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.

GNOME developer Emmanuele Bassi shared his latest findings after bringing Meson over to libepoxy, the library for abstracting some of the OpenGL / OpenGL ES differences and setup behavior across windowing systems and other environments.

He found that with moving Epoxy from Autotools to Meson, the build time was 45% shorter. Bassi wrote, "A fairly good fraction of the autotools time is spent going through the autogen and configure phases, because they both aren’t parallelised, and create a ton of shell invocations. Conversely, Meson’s configuration phase is incredibly fast; the whole Meson build of Epoxy fits in the same time the autogen.sh and configure scripts complete their run."

This is generally what other developers have found as well with Meson being much quicker than alternatives.

Those interested in more details on the benefits of moving Epoxy from Autotools to Meson can read Emmanuele's blog post. Those wanting to learn more about Meson this weekend can visit MesonBuild.com.