&gt; To date the only examples of this done with a measure of effectiveness are actually entire operating system distributions backed by software like apt, yum, pkg-src, etc.<p>npm seems to handle this just fine for both JS and native (c++) node modules via gyp, and it&#x27;s officially supported on at least three platforms (Windows, Linux, OS X) using 3 different compilers AFAIK (microsoft c&#x2F;c++, gcc and clang respectively). Granted, node enforces specific conventions for packaging and lookup (package.json and node_modules), but there&#x27;s no reason similar conventions can&#x27;t be created for C&#x2F;C++ modules, even if they&#x27;re more complicated due to language specific complexity (dynamic vs static linking). Mantaining packages up to date for a lot of open source projects could be done by a sufficiently dedicated community.