[Sanddancer]

No. I want people to stop reinventing the metadata wheel. I used system packages as an example. We now have Package.swift for swift and package.json for node, cargo.toml for rust, etc. What problem does Package.swift solve that package.json doesn't?

[pjmlp]

How does package.json handle compiler semantics, linker, library, modules, architectures, incremental compilation, cross-compilation, dependencies to Objective-C and C libraries, ... ?

[Sanddancer]

There are configuration variables for pretty much everything you listed. There are also variables for preinstall scripts, postinstall scripts, removal scripts, upgrade scripts, etc. defined in the package.json spec.