Available programming languagesWhat software can be managed with mamba?

The conda-forge project ships with interpreters and compilers for many different programming languages. Here are a few common ones and how to use them:

Python

Most people associate mamba / conda with Python and Data Science -- and it is definitely an important use case. The conda-forge project keeps multiple Python versions up-to-date and packages lots of Python-related tools. It's easy to select your favorite Python version with micromamba create -n myenv python=3.10.

Python is also special-cased for update operations: the solver tries to keep the minor version constant.

You can also install some other Python tools into your environment to install packages not available on conda-forge. Some available tools are

  • pip
  • poetry
  • pyenv
  • hatch

R

Many data scientists love R. It is easy to install R and compiled R packages from the conda-forge channel. The R interpreter and some recommended libraries are installable with the r package. A smaller r-base package also exists with only the interpreter. All R packages are prefixed with r-*. Some useful packages that are available (among many others):

  • r-ggplot2
  • r-odbc
  • r-tidyr

C / C++

The conda-forge ecosystem has great support for C / C++ packages. The compiler packages are easily available on macOS and Linux by installing the - compilers package. The compilers package installs the default C, C++ and Fortran compilers. To select individual compilers, the c-compiler, cxx-compiler and fortran-compiler packages can be used.

On Linux the default compiler is gcc. On macOS the default compiler is clang.

On Windows, the native MSVC compilers are used. This means the system must come with a working installation of MSVC (e.g. MSVC community edition). The c-compiler and cxx-compiler packages currently depend on vs2019 (this will be updated in the future to point to vs2022). The vsXXXX packages are compiler activation packages that search the system for a Visual Studio / MSVC installation using vswhere. When the matching vsXXXX version is found on the system, the appropriate environment variables are set to make tools like CMake automatically find the proper compiler and toolchain.

Other commonly used tools for C/C++ development that are available on conda-forge are:

  • make
  • ninja
  • cmake
  • meson
  • clang-format

Rust

To install the Rust compiler that comes with cargo, just install the rust package.

Go

To install the Go compiler, just install the go package.

Javascript

To install node, it's enough to install the nodejs into an environment. The package automatically comes with the npm package manager. It is also possible to get yarn directly from conda-forge.

Other programming languages

There are plenty of other programming languages readily packaged as part of the conda-forge project. A non-exhaustive list:

  • deno
  • zig
  • ruby

Use the search function to find the one that you are looking for and let us know if you are missing any!