Comment by no_circuit

I wouldn't recommend Cargo as something to copy for a real project, even though I've a fan of and have been using Rust exclusively lately. It suffers from not being able to handle global features without manually/conditionally propagating features to dependencies, as well as not being able to propagate metadata to dependencies without abusing the links functionality.

Why is that important? Well that's useful if you want something like json/serde or not in all transitive dependencies for a particular artifact you are generating like a library or a binary. That applies for other configurability that C/C++ developers bake into their libraries too.

Is this an educational learning experience as part of Hackclub which is a linked organization on your GitHub profile? Whether or not if so, trying to build this will be a good learning experience.

Think beyond just C/C++ and maybe Rust...

The entire set of ideas of things to implement is just to look at the feature set of Bazel and Buck 2 (which happens to also be written in Rust). Those offer functionality to build complete products in any language, locally or distributed across a build farm of servers, and glue them all together in any format. For example you can't build a multi-arch OCI/Docker container image for a Rust-binary server in a single command with Cargo.

Except for the initial learning curve, using them could be as simple as including their "build" files in your published git repo. No central repository needed.

https://github.com/hackclub https://bazel.build/about/why https://buck2.build/docs/about/why/