Since Swift has a 'first-party' package manager in the form of Swift Package Manager, it would be interesting to evaluate whether we could use that, instead of CocoaPods, for Swift plugins. That would allow for gradual migration away from CocoaPods over time assuming plugin development eventually shifts toward Swift, rather than having to do an expensive, ecosystem-breaking one-time migration.

According to docs, SPM packages can contain C/ObjC/C++/ObjC++ code, which substantially mitigates the bootstrapping problem; given that people could presumably make SPM packages that wrap existing non-Swift libraries for use in Swift plugins.