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An extremely random fact I noticed when writing the companion article [1] to this (an OCaml experience report):

    "Docker, Guix and NixOS (stable) all had their first releases
    during 2013, making that a bumper year for packaging aficionados."
Now we get coding agent updates every week, but has there been a similar year since 2013 where multiple great projects all came out at the same time?

[1]: https://anil.recoil.org/papers/2025-docker-icfp.pdf



hg and git came weeks apart and fossil shortly after if that counts


TBH I feel as if only docker belongs in that list. Guix and nix have users, sure, but not remotely like docker.


Yeah they are way better than docker for packaging


Why is docker used by far the most, then?


Laziness


docker got popular because it had better DX (better tooling), it was like a super lightweight VM (and initially people really wanted to put init and SSH into containers)

easy but powerful, it's not just packaging, it's also a very basic deployment system too. (docker ps) and said better allowed a relatively foolproof cross-platform develop-deploy loop.




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