Meson 1.0 Build System Nears With Stable Rust Module, Other Improvements

[nanonyme]

I thought I had. A couple years ago, some large project like Mesa switched to Meson, after initially switching to CMake. Maybe the CMake transition wasn't completed?

I just had a look at the Meson site, and their performance comparison shows no significant speed advantage over CMake.

https://mesonbuild.com/Simple-comparison.html

I'm a little disappointed that Meson is another buildsystem generator, rather than a full Make-replacement. A lot of what I dislike about CMake is related to this fact. That's not to say I dislike CMake, but it does have its downsides that you'll tend to hit in a sufficiently complex project.

ninja is a full make replacement. CMake and Meson are autotools replacements. ninja is very good at what it does, so good that both CMake and Meson projects normally use it.

[coder]

ninja is a full make replacement. CMake and Meson are autotools replacements. ninja is very good at what it does, so good that both CMake and Meson projects normally use it.

About 15+ years ago, I wrote a GNU Make buildsystem that used metaprogramming techniques to achieve all of the nice features I like about CMake, but without the drawbacks of a 2-phase build. I don't consider something to be a true "make replacement", if it doesn't allow me to do similar. And if it does, then maybe we don't really need CMake?

The main reason we switched to CMake is that it's standard. However, you could imagine implementing a buildsystem by creating a "library" of files to be included in your Makefiles. In other words, decouple the tool from its application, kind of like we do in normal programming languages. Even CMake has this "library" concept, in the form of its modules.