Meson Build System Takes 45% Less Time Than Autotools For Epoxy

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Meson Build System Takes 45% Less Time Than Autotools For Epoxy

GNOME developers continue investing in the Meson Build System and the results continue to be much faster than Autotools and generally other build systems too...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Meson-Epoxy-Speed

[peppercats]

Autotools is garbage. Cmake is too, just less smelly garbage.

I might check Meson out for my current project, it seems to be gaining steam.

[Delgarde]

Autotools is garbage. Cmake is too, just less smelly garbage.

I might check Meson out for my current project, it seems to be gaining steam.

Autotools was great for its day, as a means of getting build consistency across diverse Unix platforms - but it's showing its age. CMake, yeah... it's much newer than Autotools, but despite that, doesn't really offer any compelling advantages.

Meson? Well, we'll see. The examples I've seen look simple enough - but I'm a little wary of a build tool that's basically embedding a full-fledged scripting language. Build scripts always have the tendency to get horrifically complicated very very quickly, and it looks like Meson would also make that *much* easier.

[pipe13]

Autotools was great for its day, as a means of getting build consistency across diverse Unix platforms - but it's showing its age. CMake, yeah... it's much newer than Autotools, but despite that, doesn't really offer any compelling advantages.

Meson? Well, we'll see. The examples I've seen look simple enough - but I'm a little wary of a build tool that's basically embedding a full-fledged scripting language. Build scripts always have the tendency to get horrifically complicated very very quickly, and it looks like Meson would also make that *much* easier.

Scons, anyone?

[ldo17]

CMake, yeah... it's much newer than Autotools, but despite that, doesn't really offer any compelling advantages.

CMake is a meta-build system: it can target GNU Make on POSIXy systems, as well as various well-known proprietary IDEs on other systems. All with one set of control files.

[ldo17]

Scons, anyone?

Fun fact: Blender used to support building with either Scons or CMake. They recently threw out Scons, and decided to stick with CMake.

[Kemosabe]

Scons, anyone?

It gets horrible slow with increasing project size. We ended up copying and pasting single compile commands for testing single files during development ...

[Hextremist]

Autotools was great for its day, as a means of getting build consistency across diverse Unix platforms - but it's showing its age. CMake, yeah... it's much newer than Autotools, but despite that, doesn't really offer any compelling advantages.

I haven't tried Meson, but I used autotools for more than a decade before switching to CMake some 3 years ago. And I must say CMake is pretty nice. It is a lot faster than autotools since the configure equivalent finishes in a couple of seconds, it is easily expandable, solving problems that were really hard in autotools can be done easily in CMake, and it works cross-platform for those who need that.

[ldo17]

... solving problems that were really hard in autotools can be done easily in CMake

I instigated the introduction of stdbool in Blender. We had to add a specially-coded test to CMake to implement this, which was something that autotools already provided.

While I have committed the occasional autotools hack, my other experience with GNU m4 is leading me to conclude that it is something you really don’t want to get embroiled with if you have a choice...

[ebassi]

I'm a little wary of a build tool that's basically embedding a full-fledged scripting language.

You're in luck, then, because the Meson syntax is *not* a full-fledged scripting language; it's not even Turing-complete.

It's a very simple syntax, with support for looping and conditional branches, but it does not allow you to define new functions or new types, for instance. Meson does not even support out-of-tree extension modules, so you cannot break builds across releases by using internal unstable API.

The fact that Meson is currently written in Python is just an implementation detail; it could be rewritten in any other language - but Python hasn't been an issue in terms of speed or resource consumption up until now, while it had enabled contributions from a variety of projects.