Meson

The humble beginning

The following simple example was copy-pased from https://mesonbuild.com/Tutorial.html. It compiles just one c source unit to produce an executable.

main.c

The c source is:

#include<stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv) {
  printf("Hello there.\n");
  return 0;
}

Github repository about-meson, path: /The-humble-beginning/main.c

meson.build

meson.build is the file which describes the relationships between source files and buildable objects.

project('tutorial', 'c')
executable('demo', 'main.c')

Github repository about-meson, path: /The-humble-beginning/meson.build

Building

In the directory where meson.build is located, the meson compiler(?) needs to be invoked:

$ meson builddir

This command creates the directory builddir in which ninja is used to compile the project:

$ cd builddir
$ ninja
$ ./demo

Nice features

Meson seems to have a few nice features. The following meson.build script determines the version of the c compiler and issues a message if it is smaller than 7.0.0:

project('nice-features', 'c')

c=meson.get_compiler('c')

c_version = c.version()

message('compiler version ' + c_version)

if c_version.version_compare('< 7.0.0')
   message('Please upgrade to at least 7.0.0')
endif