Thanks for sharing a simple setup that avoids SwiftPM. It is nice to have more options.
Swift has to shed the perception that it only works on apple platforms. I've found the the C++ interop to be pretty good for my computer vision use cases.
The build process requires you to have a C library built with its own dependencies. I don’t think it’s very common to do that with SwiftPM, hence it would require extra work for it to happen.
CMake support started as a community project but was adopted officially by Apple after they started adopting some Swift in the compiler codebase – an extremely large and complex CMake project – so the support is extremely robust now.
Swift has to shed the perception that it only works on apple platforms. I've found the the C++ interop to be pretty good for my computer vision use cases.