The Meson build system at GUADEC 2016

For the third year in a row, Centricular was at GUADEC, and this year we sponsored the evening party on the final day at Hoepfner’s Burghof! Hopefully everyone enjoyed it as much as we hoped. :)

The focus for me this year was to try and tell people about the work we've been doing on porting GStreamer to Meson and to that end, I gave a talk on the second day about how to build your GNOME app ~2x faster than before.

The talk title itself was a bit of a lie, since most of the talk was about how Autotools is a mess and how Meson has excellent features (better syntax!) and in-built support for most of the GNOME infrastructure to make it easy for people to use it. But for some people the attraction is also that Meson provides better support on platforms such as Windows, and improves build times on all platforms massively; ranging from 2x on Linux to 10-15x on Windows.

Thanks to the excellent people at c3voc.de, the talks were all live-streamed, and you can see my talk at their relive website for GUADEC 2016.

It was heartening to see that over the past year people have warmed up to the idea of using Meson as a replacement for Autotools. Several people said kind and encouraging words to me and Jussi over the course of the conference (it helps that GNOME is filled with a friendly community!). We will continue to improve Meson and with luck we can get rid of Autotools over time.

The best approach, as always, is to start with the simple projects, get familiar with the syntax, and report any bugs you find! We look forward to your bugs and pull requests. ;)