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---
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title: Comparisons
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...
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# Comparing Meson with other build systems #
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A common question is *Why should I choose Meson over a different build
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system X?* There is no one true answer to this as it depends on the
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use case. Almost all build systems have all the functionality needed
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to build medium-to-large projects so the decision is usually made on
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other points. Here we list some pros and cons of various build systems
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to help you do the decision yourself.
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## GNU Autotools ##
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### Pros ###
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Excellent support for legacy Unix platforms, large selection of
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existing modules.
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### Cons ###
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Needlessly slow, complicated, hard to use correctly, unreliable,
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painful to debug, incomprehensible for most people, poor support for
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non-Unix platforms (especially Windows).
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## CMake ##
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### Pros ###
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Great support for multiple backends (Visual Studio, XCode, etc).
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### Cons ###
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The scripting language is cumbersome to work with. Some simple things
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are more complicated than necessary.
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## SCons ##
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### Pros ###
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Full power of Python available for defining your build.
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### Cons ###
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Slow. Requires you to pass your configuration settings on every
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invocation. That is, if you do `scons OPT1 OPT2` and then just
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`scons`, it will reconfigure everything without settings `OPT1` and
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`OPT2`. Every other build system remembers build options from the
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previous invocation.
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## Bazel
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# Pros
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Proven to scale to very large projects.
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## Cons
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Implemented in Java. Poor Windows support. Heavily focused on Google's
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way of doing things (which may be a good or a bad thing). Contributing
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code requires [signing a CLA](https://bazel.build/contributing.html).
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## Meson ##
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### Pros ###
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The fastest build system [see
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measurements](Performance-comparison.md), user friendly, designed to
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be as invisible to the developer as possible, native support for
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modern tools (precompiled headers, coverage, Valgrind etc). Not Turing
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complete so build definition files are easy to read and understand.
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### Cons ###
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Relatively new so it does not have a large user base yet, and may thus
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contain some unknown bugs. Visual Studio and XCode backends not as
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high quality as Ninja one.
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