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

The Meson build system continues enjoying terrific developer adoption and that's even prior to declaring a "1.0" version. However, that's about to change with Meson 1.0-rc1 having now been issued for testing.

Meson 1.0-rc1 was released today as a test version ahead of declaring the big Meson 1.0 release. Though with Meson already quite featureful and showing it can successfully serve as a replacement to Autotools, CMake, and other build systems with great speed and cross-platform compatibility, Meson has already proven its capabilities.

With Meson 1.0 the notable changes so far include support for arrays with the "prefix" keyword argument, removal of some flags from the cpp/objcpp warning level 1, various developer environment improvements, support for the "in" operator on strings, a "warning-level=everything" option, and the Rust module is declared stable. The Rust module is being marked as stable in part since the Mesa 3D project with its initial Rust support and Rusticl introduction is relying on this module and proven its design is satisfactory.

Among the developer environment improvements with Meson 1.0 is a "--workdir" argument to set a work directory separate from the build directory, cross-compiling improvements, "--dump" improvements, and other changes.

More details on the Meson 1.0 changes via the work-in-progress release notes. The Meson 1.0-rc1 test release can be downloaded from GitHub.