> I keep considering that we might want to port Cargo to support other languages... It's better than nearly everything out there that I've ever used.

I don't think that this would solve anything. A big problem for instance is maintainers who insist in keeping compatibility for totally obsolete stuff - see for instance zlib which clings on DOS compatibility, or Nethack which just started to use ANSI C features in the latest release ; before this they were on K&R C. As a result build sytems are terrible since they have to handle so many edge cases for obsolete compiler vendors, Watcom C & friends for instance. Rust code doesn't have this kind of legacy to handle.

For C it’s not as obvious how this could be accomplished, but it would be possible. There are lots of Rust projects that embed C today, and add C flags for the LLVM.

The language I was really thinking of was Java, where Cargo is far superior to maven. I’ve never had time, but what I’ve thought would be neat is to take a Cargo.toml file as input, and then generate the maven files from that, like Cargo.lock files in Rust.