Developers Explore Meson Build System For Wayland / Weston

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Developers Explore Meson Build System For Wayland / Weston

A growing number of GNOME projects have been exploring Meson as a next-gen build system with one of the benefits being much faster build times. Now Daniel Stone at Collabora is exploring using Meson for Wayland and its Weston Weston compositor...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Wayland-Meson-Build-Sys-Patches

[emblemparade]

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.

[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.

[GreatEmerald]

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

[shmerl]

CMake + Ninja - good combination.

[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

[doom_Oo7]

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

[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.

[gufide]

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

[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.