The Meson Build system

Overview

Meson is an open source build system meant to be both extremely fast, and, even more importantly, as user friendly as possible.

The main design point of Meson is that every moment a developer spends writing or debugging build definitions is a second wasted. So is every second spent waiting for the build system to actually start compiling code.

Features

multiplatform support for Linux, macOS, Windows, GCC, Clang, Visual Studio and others
supported languages include C, C++, D, Fortran, Java, Rust
build definitions in a very readable and user friendly non-Turing complete DSL
cross compilation for many operating systems as well as bare metal
optimized for extremely fast full and incremental builds without sacrificing correctness
built-in multiplatform dependency provider that works together with distro packages
fun!

Quickstart for beginners

Are you an absolute beginner when it comes to programming? No worries, read this beginner guide to get started.

Community

There are two main methods of connecting with other Meson developers. The easiest way for most people is a web chat. The channel to use is #mesonbuild either via Matrix (web interface) or OFTC IRC.

The second one is the mailing list, which is hosted at Google Groups.

Projects using Meson

Many projects are using Meson and they're a great resource for learning what to (and what not to!) do when converting existing projects to Meson.

A short list of Meson users can be found here but there are many more. We would love to hear about your success stories too and how things could be improved too!