Finnish developer Jussi Pakkanen was frustrated by existing build systems with foolish syntax in configuration files and unexpected behavior [1]. During the Christmas season of 2012, he therefore decided to develop his own build system that would run fast, be reliable and easy to use, run on all major operating systems, and integrate important test tools like Valgrind.Just two months later, Pakkanen published a first version of his build system, which, as a trained physicist, he named for the Meson particle. Since then, the technology has advanced quickly. Version 0.17.0 – the latest version when this article was written – is already extremely stable despite its low version number and contains all the features planned by the program author.

Meson builds executables and libraries and supports multiple directories for different builds from the same source. The flexible configuration language is easy to learn, opens many possibilities to the developer, and supports if statements.

Presentable Features

Meson is written entirely in Python 3 and is released under Apache License 2.0. One minor drawback, however, is that, currently, Meson can only handle source code in the programming languages, C, C++, Java, and Vala. Meson does not bundle the source code into the appropriate compiler itself; rather, it simply generates configuration files for an existing build system. Under Linux, Meson generates build files for the relatively unknown but quite nimble Ninja [2] mini-build system. Alternatively, Meson outputs project files for Visual Studio 2010 or Xcode. Meson refers to all of these external tools as back ends.

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