Anyone who has written a non-trivial project using Autotools has realized that (and wondered why) it requires you to be aware of 5 different languages. Once you spend enough time with the innards of the system, you begin to realize that it is nothing short of an astonishing feat of engineering. Engineering that belongs in a museum. Not as part of critical infrastructure.
Autotools was created in the 1980s and caters to the needs of an entirely different world of software from what we have at present. Worse yet, it carries over accumulated cruft from the past 40 years — ostensibly for better “cross-platform support” but that “support” is mostly for extinct platforms that five people in the whole world remember.
We've learned how to make it work for most cases that concern FOSS developers on Linux, and it can be made to limp along on other platforms that the majority of people use, but it does not inspire confidence or really anything except frustration. People will not like your project or contribute to it if the build system takes 10x longer to compile on their platform of choice, does not integrate with the preferred IDE, and requires knowledge arcane enough to be indistinguishable from cargo-cult programming.
As a result there have been several (terrible) efforts at replacing it and each has been either incomplete, short-sighted, slow, or just plain ugly. During my time as a Gentoo developer in another life, I came in close contact with and developed a keen hatred for each of these alternative build systems. And so I mutely went back to Autotools and learned that I hated it the least of them all.
Sometime last year, Tim heard about this new build system called ‘Meson’ whose author had created an experimental port of GStreamer that built it in record time.
Intrigued, he tried it out and found that it finished suspiciously quickly. His first instinct was that it was broken and hadn’t actually built everything! Turns out this build system written in Python 3 with Ninja as the backend actually was that fast. About 2.5x faster on Linux and 10x faster on Windows for building the core GStreamer repository.
Upon further investigation, Tim and I found that Meson also has really clean generic cross-compilation support (including iOS and Android), runs natively (and just as quickly) on OS X and Windows, supports GNU, Clang, and MSVC toolchains, and can even (configure and) generate XCode and Visual Studio project files!
But the critical thing that convinced me was that the creator Jussi Pakkanen was genuinely interested in the use-cases of widely-used software such as Qt, GNOME, and GStreamer and had already added support for several tools and idioms that we use — pkg-config, gtk-doc, gobject-introspection, gdbus-codegen, and so on. The project places strong emphasis on both speed and ease of use and is quite friendly to contributions.
Over the past few months, Tim and I at Centricular have been working on creating Meson ports for most of the GStreamer repositories and the fundamental dependencies (libffi, glib, orc) and improving the MSVC toolchain support in Meson.
We are proud to report that you can now build GStreamer on Linux using the GNU toolchain and on Windows with either MinGW or MSVC 2015 using Meson build files that ship with the source (building upon Jussi's initial ports).
Other toolchain/platform combinations haven't been tested yet, but they should work in theory (minus bugs!), and we intend to test and bugfix all the configurations supported by GStreamer (Linux, OS X, Windows, iOS, Android) before proposing it for inclusion as an alternative build system for the GStreamer project.
You can either grab the source yourself and build everything, or use our (with luck, temporary) fork of GStreamer's cross-platform build aggregator Cerbero.
Update: I wrote a new post with detailed steps on how to build using Cerbero and generate Visual Studio project files.
Second update: All this is now upstream, see the upstream Cerbero repository's README
Personally, I really hope that Meson gains widespread adoption. Calling Autotools the Xorg of build systems is flattery. It really is just a terrible system. We really need to invest in something that works for us rather than against us.
PS: If you just want a quick look at what the build system syntax looks like, take a look at this or the basic tutorial.
Autotools was created in the 1980s and caters to the needs of an entirely different world of software from what we have at present. Worse yet, it carries over accumulated cruft from the past 40 years — ostensibly for better “cross-platform support” but that “support” is mostly for extinct platforms that five people in the whole world remember.
We've learned how to make it work for most cases that concern FOSS developers on Linux, and it can be made to limp along on other platforms that the majority of people use, but it does not inspire confidence or really anything except frustration. People will not like your project or contribute to it if the build system takes 10x longer to compile on their platform of choice, does not integrate with the preferred IDE, and requires knowledge arcane enough to be indistinguishable from cargo-cult programming.
As a result there have been several (terrible) efforts at replacing it and each has been either incomplete, short-sighted, slow, or just plain ugly. During my time as a Gentoo developer in another life, I came in close contact with and developed a keen hatred for each of these alternative build systems. And so I mutely went back to Autotools and learned that I hated it the least of them all.
Sometime last year, Tim heard about this new build system called ‘Meson’ whose author had created an experimental port of GStreamer that built it in record time.
Intrigued, he tried it out and found that it finished suspiciously quickly. His first instinct was that it was broken and hadn’t actually built everything! Turns out this build system written in Python 3 with Ninja as the backend actually was that fast. About 2.5x faster on Linux and 10x faster on Windows for building the core GStreamer repository.
Upon further investigation, Tim and I found that Meson also has really clean generic cross-compilation support (including iOS and Android), runs natively (and just as quickly) on OS X and Windows, supports GNU, Clang, and MSVC toolchains, and can even (configure and) generate XCode and Visual Studio project files!
But the critical thing that convinced me was that the creator Jussi Pakkanen was genuinely interested in the use-cases of widely-used software such as Qt, GNOME, and GStreamer and had already added support for several tools and idioms that we use — pkg-config, gtk-doc, gobject-introspection, gdbus-codegen, and so on. The project places strong emphasis on both speed and ease of use and is quite friendly to contributions.
Over the past few months, Tim and I at Centricular have been working on creating Meson ports for most of the GStreamer repositories and the fundamental dependencies (libffi, glib, orc) and improving the MSVC toolchain support in Meson.
We are proud to report that you can now build GStreamer on Linux using the GNU toolchain and on Windows with either MinGW or MSVC 2015 using Meson build files that ship with the source (building upon Jussi's initial ports).
Other toolchain/platform combinations haven't been tested yet, but they should work in theory (minus bugs!), and we intend to test and bugfix all the configurations supported by GStreamer (Linux, OS X, Windows, iOS, Android) before proposing it for inclusion as an alternative build system for the GStreamer project.
You can either grab the source yourself and build everything, or use our (with luck, temporary) fork of GStreamer's cross-platform build aggregator Cerbero.
Update: I wrote a new post with detailed steps on how to build using Cerbero and generate Visual Studio project files.
Second update: All this is now upstream, see the upstream Cerbero repository's README
Personally, I really hope that Meson gains widespread adoption. Calling Autotools the Xorg of build systems is flattery. It really is just a terrible system. We really need to invest in something that works for us rather than against us.
PS: If you just want a quick look at what the build system syntax looks like, take a look at this or the basic tutorial.
