Porting Mesa/Libdrm's Build System To Meson Brings Up Controversy

[emblemparade]

Meson does not use Python as its build script language.

That's right, I shouldn't have lumped all of these together in that comment. I'll insist, though, that what you say is an advantage can also be a major disadvantage. It's true that inventing one's own build script language makes sure that it's separate from the implementation, but that pretty much guarantees a very weak, immature language, which in my mind throws you into the all the problems issues that Makefiles haves. A few lines of Python (or Ruby or JavaScript or Lua) code can solve complex problems very easily. My work on Rōnin came right out of my disappointments in Meson.

[unixfan2001]

While that may be less unrealistic than a “decent, general purpose IDE”...

Looks like you haven't yet heard the news of our Lord and Saviour, Visual Studio Code.

[ldo17]

Looks like you haven't yet heard the news of our Lord and Saviour, Visual Studio Code.

Really?

[unixfan2001]

Really?

1. That's a Mac OS exclusive issue.
2. TextEdit isn't even an Electron app, so this is clearly an issue not exclusive to Visual Studio Code. It merely confirms what many of us already knew. Apple's software quality is decreasing rapidly.
3. Atom and Visual Studio Code are still the best general purpose IDEs out there. They're highly customizable and you can whip something up very fast in them.
They have extensions for everything (including test frameworks. With Jest even plotting the result directly to the editor) and are generally quite ok in terms of memory usage (VSCode is certainly a hell of a lot better than VS Professional in that regard).

[ldo17]

1. That's a Mac OS exclusive issue.

From the article:

For other macOS applications that present a blinking cursor, like Chrome or TextEdit, Liss said, the CPU usage isn't nearly as excessive.

So no, it doesn’t seem to be a problem with Apple’s code as such.

2. TextEdit isn't even an Electron app, so this is clearly an issue not exclusive to Visual Studio Code.

But it doesn’t happen with anything else. Except other Electron-based apps (e.g. Slack).

Maybe you didn’t understand the article?

3. Atom and Visual Studio Code are still the best general purpose IDEs out there.

I think I can offer examples of real-world projects that they cannot handle...

[andreano]

make -j

The last time I tried that I went on a drunken frenzy, poured gasoline over my computer, torched it and woke up naked, in the woods.

LOL!

My story: I once wrote an innocent build script that ran make -j because of a peculiarity of bash, but only on the buildserver (at work), keeping it unresponsive for hours, despite working just fine on everyone's developer machines.

I'm sure it would make a good entry in an underhanded bash contest. Here it is, the broken and the fixed script. Does anybody see how the first could fail catastrophically, but not the second?

Broken:

#!/bin/bash

# Exit on error, such as if nproc is not installed
set -e

make -j"$(nproc)"

Fixed:

#!/bin/bash

# Exit on error, such as if nproc is not installed
set -e
nproc="$(nproc)"

make -j"$nproc"

[andreano]

Sooner or later you will need to run custom command sequences at build time, and then what do you do?

Make a custom target. That's why every serious buildsystem must support custom targets! CMake has it, and I'm sure Meson has it too.