presentation.md

Meson Presentation

See https://mesonbuild.com/Comparisons.html

Meson

Pros

• Fast build times with Ninja
  • https://mesonbuild.com/Performance-comparison.html
  • 'empty build' or 'nothing needed' build times are instantaneous
• Can do everything that Autotools can (as far as I can tell)
• Easier maintenance due to simplicity and explicitness
  • Python-like simple syntax
  • Easy to use
• Supports unity builds for even faster build times from scratch
• Well documented
• Open Source
• Actively developed
• No need for running autogen to generate makefiles
• Guides to port from Autotools to Meson
  • https://mesonbuild.com/Porting-from-autotools.html#porting-from-autotools
  • https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/GnomeGoals/MesonPorting
• Used by some large projects:
  • Systemd - https://github.com/systemd/systemd
  • All GNOME projects (see meson porting webpage above) ** GLib - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib ** GTK+ - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk ** HexChat IRC Chat Client - https://github.com/hexchat/hexchat
  • Xorg - https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver
• It's a joy to use compared to Autotools
• Native support for modern tools (coverage, Valgrind, static analyzers)
• Does not use Make or shell scripts
  • It can still call external scripts and programs if needed
• Is built with portability and cross-compilation in mind
• Works with other languages, like Rust

Cons

• Relatively new
• Does not yet have a very large user base
• Unfamiliar to the team; yet another thing to learn
• Because of active development, meson OS packages are old
• Requires python3, pip3, and installing meson via pip3
• Slightly different command line syntax to build and configure a project
• Mainly developed by one guy, with only a small supplementary development team
  • If that guy disappears, then there could be a support problem
• Because of active development, feature set is changing
• Linux distros know the Autotools workflow well; they may not know or want to know how to use Meson

Autotools

Pros

• Stable
• De facto standard - Used by many people
• Well-known by a lot of people
• Understood(?) by our team
• Can do everything

Cons

• Difficult to understand
  • Harder to maintain build scripts
  • Easier to introduce bugs and errors
  • Harder to track down build/link bugs
• Slower
  • Reduces programmer productivity waiting for builds
• More verbose
• Relies on shell scripts and Make
• Possibly not as portable

Conclusion

• I believe that moving to Meson will reduce our technical debt.
• It will save debugging time when we have issues figuring out random linking errors.
• It will also save developer time with the faster build times.
• Maintaining and editing the build scripts will also be easier and less error-prone.

My recommendation is to give it a try alongside autotools until it proves to be stable. If needed, we can even do separate meson_ branches, so it's isolated.