Meson is a Python-based build system that generates build rules of
Ninja, Visual Studio, and XCode. It's designed to be fast, and have a
small, non-Turing complete language to describe the build process,
tests, and dependencies. It's simpler than CMake, and faster than
autotools.
As a direct comparison in terms of speed, three build and check runs for
libepoxy from a clean Git repository clone yield these results on my
Kabylake Core i7 7500U (nproc=4):
- Autotools (make)
Run #1 (cold) real: 22.384s, user: 20.011s, sys: 3.689s
Run #2 (warm) real: 22.429s, user: 20.220s, sys: 3.708s
Run #3 (warm) real: 22.068s, user: 19.743s, sys: 3.594s
- Meson (ninja)
Run #1 (cold) real: 5.932s, user: 9.371s, sys: 1.625s
Run #2 (warm) real: 6.273s, user: 10.066, sys: 1.740s
Run #3 (warm) real: 5.796s, user: 9.233s, sys: 1.607s
Which means that Meson and ninja are approximately 4x faster than
autotools.
In terms of simplicity, the autotools build takes six files and a total
of 645 lines; Meson requires 3 files, and 361 lines to achieve the same
result. Additionally, Meson automatically builds in a separate build
directory and does not leave files inside the source directory; and Meson
does not use libtool.
Since Meson is quite new and still actively developed, we're going to
leave the autotools build in place for a while, with the intention of
switching to Meson in the future.
Emmanuele Bassi