11–20 of 34 posts
> Really there were only two viable candidates: CMake and Meson. Would be great to hear why those were the only two candidates that they considered (and not e.g. Bazel or Nix).
I haven't followed Meson closely in about 3 years, but I also got the sense that Windows support sometimes lagged. If that's true, it's going to be a tough sell for the many large C++ projects who adopted CMake almost exclusively due to its support for Windows and Visual Studio.
> Really there were only two viable candidates: CMake and Meson. Would be great to hear why those were the only two candidates that they considered (and not e.g. Bazel or Nix).
Yes, perhaps it is true, and it is obvious to build experts, but as a novice in this area (build systems), I would love for some more exposition.
I'm using Meson for a project using C++ with Gtkmm, Libmicrohttpd, catch2 and other libraries. My experience is good neglecting some minor issues. Meson is fast, well readable if written well, uses system libraries by default and allows flexible usage. On the other side I'm using Java with Maven and it is - a big burden. It's build in dependency retrieval system also isn't helping. Maybe I just don't like XML - becau…
> Really there were only two viable candidates: CMake and Meson. Would be great to hear why those were the only two candidates that they considered (and not e.g. Bazel or Nix).
> Really there were only two viable candidates: CMake and Meson. Would be great to hear why those were the only two candidates that they considered (and not e.g. Bazel or Nix).
I suspect Bazel was ruled out because it requires the JVM and it has limited open source uptake relative to CMake (huge open source userbase), and Meson (limited presence in open source scientific software, but adopted by GNOME and systemd).
> Really there were only two viable candidates: CMake and Meson. Would be great to hear why those were the only two candidates that they considered (and not e.g. Bazel or Nix).
Nix is likely a nonstarter because as far as I can tell it does not natively support Visual Studio and MSVC. I suspect Bazel was ruled out because it requires the JVM and it has limited open source uptake relative to CMake (huge open source userbase), and Meson (limited presence in open source scientific software, but adopted by GNOME and systemd).
Based on that, I just sort of assumed that, in addition to all the fairly well-documented up-front challenges that these folks had identified and were talking about, there must also be some impassable barrier lurking around in there that nobody finds until they've already sunk a lot of time and money into trying to get it working. I don't know what that is, and I'm not curious enough to spend the better part of a year trying to find it for myself. I ended up choosing Gradle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nix is likely a nonstarter because as far as I can tell it does not natively support Visual Studio and MSVC. I suspect Bazel was ruled out because it requires the JVM and it has limited open source uptake relative to CMake (huge open source userbase), and Meson (limited presence in open source scientific software, but adopted by GNOME and systemd).
I can't speak for scipy, but I ruled Bazel out for a project that included Python components a few years ago. It was great for C, C++, and Java projects, but, at least at the time, there was no official Python support. I looked into third-party options and the feasibility of building it myself. Most of what I found was a few different conference talks and blog posts where the presenter was enthusiastically talking ab…
It went from “maybe run stdlib Python in an activated venv“ to actually working.
> Really there were only two viable candidates: CMake and Meson. Would be great to hear why those were the only two candidates that they considered (and not e.g. Bazel or Nix).