2021.01.03 13:20 "Re: [Tiff] Autotools (was: Enabling and requiring C99 language support)", by Roger Leigh

after trying several build systems, my feeling tends to meson:

• faster than autotools, especially on Windows with MSYS 2
• a bit faster than cmake
• syntax is so much nicer than autotools and cmake, and lighter. One can run python scripts for specific purposes, python being widely used
• cross compilation is nicer than with cmake
• it honors CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS, etc...,contrary to cmake

There’s no doubt that Meson is nice, but it serves a particular niche and doesn’t come close to solving the portability and interoperability problems which CMake provides. Maybe it will in the future. Being slightly better in some technical respects isn’t sufficient in my opinion to make it worth the switch. CMake is much more than the tool; it’s the entire ecosystem around it which makes it valuable, and it’s become the default for most projects for very good reasons. The added value of CMake is in the huge base of contributors, the amount of support available, including printed books as well as online material and forums, the hundreds of directly-provided and third-party modules to extend it, and the huge number of tools which integrate with it, as well as the sheer number of projects already using it. Meson has a lot of catching up to do before it can displace that.

Regards,

Roger