Developers Explore Meson Build System For Wayland / Weston

[TingPing]

I doubt Jussi Pakkanen would have written Meson if he was content with CMake – CMake is already 16 years old.

Meson feels very similar to CMake in what it does – comparing it with autotools is a joke.
In terms of what it looks like, I much prefer the pythonic typed Meson syntax over CMake's magical variables which I can't wrap my head around.

The Meson language is made to feel familiar to python programmers, but *is not* python – nothing prevents Meson from being rewritten in any other language.

Indeed. Python is an implementation detail; it uses its own, very simple, language for the build scripts. Python's performance has never been an issue so far and it is very portable and easy to develop so that is why it uses it. Jussi has done a lot of presentations and posts over Meson and I've been using and contributing to it myself and it has been a great experience compared to other build systems I've used.

[liam]

I know this is beside the point but how impressive is that rock2 platform? It's clocked much lower than the laptop, has 1/8 the ram and a slow storage interface, but still puts in surprisingly quick build times.

[andreano]

I doubt Jussi Pakkanen would have written Meson if he was content with CMake – CMake is already 16 years old.

Meson feels very similar to CMake in what it does – comparing it with autotools is a joke.
In terms of what it looks like, I much prefer the pythonic typed Meson syntax over CMake's magical variables which I can't wrap my head around.

The Meson language is made to feel familiar to python programmers, but *is not* python – nothing prevents Meson from being rewritten in any other language.

[gufide]

CMake is pretty much de facto standard these days. However build2 seems interesting, but I did not got deep into it.

[AsuMagic]

But.. You don't need to depend on any build system if you have CMake, don't you? The end-user can generate the kind of makefile he wants, from make to visual studio by ninja if they want.

[doom_Oo7]

+1 for CMake - Ninja, works wonders for me and is very standard & available on every platform.

[M@yeulC]

I recently heard about tup, which seems to be pretty fast. I was going to ask how fast was Meson, but the answer seems to have been posted here while I was waiting for the thread creation

[shmerl]

CMake + Ninja - good combination.

[GreatEmerald]

Yea, I was thinking "what's that? And why are they not considering Ninja?" That explains it.

[mcirsta]

This is a weird message. Meson is not fast, it's Ninja that's fast: Meson is just a (rather bad) Python frontend to NInja.

My thoughts exactly. At first I took this seriously. Then I saw Meson was just a glorified python script and got over it.

Seriously folks, python is a lot of things but fast is not one of them. Heck the regular interpreter can still use only on core as far as I know. I have 16 cores and 32 threads so imagine how efficient that is....

Why not cmake instead ? It might not be perfect but I've used it and really like it. It also has the option to generate ninja files and the generation of these ninja ( or make ) files is pretty fast.