GLib 2.58 Is Looking Good With Portability Improvements, Efficient Process Launching

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GLib 2.58 Is Looking Good With Portability Improvements, Efficient Process Launching

The GLib low-level GNOME library while being quite mature is seeing a significant update with its version 2.58 release due out this September for GNOME 3.30...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GLib-2.58-Features-Coming

[tildearrow]

Typo:

and more eficient app launching.

[Redfoxmoon]

This is all good and nice, as long as they don't drop autotools support. meson is a horrible mess, especially when you need cross compilation

[brrrrttttt]

This is all good and nice, as long as they don't drop autotools support. meson is a horrible mess, especially when you need cross compilation

Agree. I don't know what they were thinking there.

[Hi-Angel]

This is all good and nice, as long as they don't drop autotools support. meson is a horrible mess, especially when you need cross compilation

Why? I haven't tried before, but I just did with a test project, and it's pretty simple. You just describe the host platform (the platform the binary gonna run on) in a file, and start the build. Like:

$ cat cross-compile.ini 
[binaries]
cpp = '/usr/bin/i686-w64-mingw32-g++'
ar  = '/usr/bin/i686-w64-mingw32-ar'

[host_machine]
system = 'windows'
cpu_family = 'x86'
cpu = 'i686'
endian = 'little'

$ meson cross-build --cross-file cross-compile.ini
The Meson build system
Version: 0.47.0
Source dir: /home/constantine/Projects/meson-test
Build dir: /home/constantine/Projects/meson-test/cross-build
Build type: cross build
Project name: foo
Project version: 0.1.0
Native C++ compiler: c++ (gcc 8.1.1 "c++ (GCC) 8.1.1 20180531")
Cross C++ compiler: /usr/bin/i686-w64-mingw32-g++ (gcc 7.3.0)
Host machine cpu family: x86
Host machine cpu: i686
Target machine cpu family: x86
Target machine cpu: i686
Build machine cpu family: x86_64
Build machine cpu: x86_64
Build targets in project: 1
Found ninja-1.8.2 at /usr/bin/ninja
WARNING: Cross file does not specify strip binary, result will not be stripped.

$ ninja -C cross-build
ninja: Entering directory `cross-build'
[2/2] Linking target foo.exe.

[Redfoxmoon]

Why? I haven't tried before, but I just did with a test project, and it's pretty simple. You just describe the host platform (the platform the binary gonna run on) in a file, and start the build. Like:

$ cat cross-compile.ini
[binaries]
cpp = '/usr/bin/i686-w64-mingw32-g++'
ar = '/usr/bin/i686-w64-mingw32-ar'

[host_machine]
system = 'windows'
cpu_family = 'x86'
cpu = 'i686'
endian = 'little'

$ meson cross-build --cross-file cross-compile.ini
The Meson build system
Version: 0.47.0
Source dir: /home/constantine/Projects/meson-test
Build dir: /home/constantine/Projects/meson-test/cross-build
Build type: cross build
Project name: foo
Project version: 0.1.0
Native C++ compiler: c++ (gcc 8.1.1 "c++ (GCC) 8.1.1 20180531")
Cross C++ compiler: /usr/bin/i686-w64-mingw32-g++ (gcc 7.3.0)
Host machine cpu family: x86
Host machine cpu: i686
Target machine cpu family: x86
Target machine cpu: i686
Build machine cpu family: x86_64
Build machine cpu: x86_64
Build targets in project: 1
Found ninja-1.8.2 at /usr/bin/ninja
WARNING: Cross file does not specify strip binary, result will not be stripped.

$ ninja -C cross-build
ninja: Entering directory `cross-build'
[2/2] Linking target foo.exe.

Yay you just compiled an example using meson. I have three major issues with meson:

1. It's not platform agnostic like autotools once you patch config.sub with an *one liner*
2. It explicitly depends on "cross files" with hardcoded paths to compilers and other tools for cross compilation: hello differing paths on peoples' systems!
3. The authors explicitly won't support something like "CROSS_CFLAGS" environment variables, because "hurr durr reasons environment variables are eeeveeeel derp herp"

All these (and probably more that I can't think of right now) makes meson get in your way when you're a package maintainer instead of helping you, like say, autotools.

[brrrrttttt]

Why? I haven't tried before, but I just did with a test project, and it's pretty simple. You just describe the host platform (the platform the binary gonna run on) in a file, and start the build. Like:

$ cat cross-compile.ini
[binaries]
cpp = '/usr/bin/i686-w64-mingw32-g++'
ar = '/usr/bin/i686-w64-mingw32-ar'

[host_machine]
system = 'windows'
cpu_family = 'x86'
cpu = 'i686'
endian = 'little'

$ meson cross-build --cross-file cross-compile.ini
The Meson build system
Version: 0.47.0
Source dir: /home/constantine/Projects/meson-test
Build dir: /home/constantine/Projects/meson-test/cross-build
Build type: cross build
Project name: foo
Project version: 0.1.0
Native C++ compiler: c++ (gcc 8.1.1 "c++ (GCC) 8.1.1 20180531")
Cross C++ compiler: /usr/bin/i686-w64-mingw32-g++ (gcc 7.3.0)
Host machine cpu family: x86
Host machine cpu: i686
Target machine cpu family: x86
Target machine cpu: i686
Build machine cpu family: x86_64
Build machine cpu: x86_64
Build targets in project: 1
Found ninja-1.8.2 at /usr/bin/ninja
WARNING: Cross file does not specify strip binary, result will not be stripped.

$ ninja -C cross-build
ninja: Entering directory `cross-build'
[2/2] Linking target foo.exe.

[binaries]
cpp = '/usr/bin/i686-w64-mingw32-g++'
ar = '/usr/bin/i686-w64-mingw32-ar'

That can only ever work on a small subset of systems...

[Hi-Angel]

[binaries]
cpp = '/usr/bin/i686-w64-mingw32-g++'
ar = '/usr/bin/i686-w64-mingw32-ar'

That can only ever work on a small subset of systems...

Weeeell, yeah, point 1 and 2 of Redfoxmoon's post made me tackle with it a bit more, and turned out it's a bug: string concatenation doesn't work.