The Meson Build System
http://mesonbuild.com/
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78 lines
2.1 KiB
78 lines
2.1 KiB
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title: Comparisons |
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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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