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Meson

An open-source build system focused on speed and ease of use.

Meson reads a project description (meson.build) and emits build files for Ninja (most commonly), Visual Studio, or Xcode. It is the default build system for GNOME and many GTK-related projects, and is gaining adoption in C/C++ projects looking for an alternative to Autotools or CMake. The configuration language is a deliberately limited Python-like syntax.

Where CMake is general-purpose and somewhat sprawling, Meson is opinionated about how a project should be structured. It emphasises fast configuration, parallel-by-default builds via Ninja, and clear error messages when something goes wrong. Cross-compilation, subprojects (Meson's mechanism for embedded dependencies), and a mature wrap database for fetching dependencies round out the feature set.

Jussi Pakkanen started Meson in 2012 and has continued as the lead maintainer, with a growing team of contributors. The project is Apache-2.0 licensed. Adoption has grown steadily, particularly in projects originally built with Autotools that were looking for a more modern configuration system.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install meson
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install meson
Arch:          sudo pacman -S meson
macOS:         brew install meson