Main VS meson

Compare Main vs meson and see what are their differences.

Main

📦 The default bucket for Scoop. (by ScoopInstaller)
Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
Main meson
10 110
1,516 5,257
16.4% 2.1%
10.0 9.8
1 day ago 4 days ago
PowerShell Python
The Unlicense Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Main

Posts with mentions or reviews of Main. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-10-23.
  • SumatraPDF Reader
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Oct 2023
  • My CNCF LFX Mentorship Spring 2023 Project at Kubescape
    19 projects | dev.to | 14 May 2023
    (merged) ScoopInstaller/Main #4757 kubescape: Update url and binary naming
  • I built a cross-platform GUI management tool for LiteDB using AvaloniaUI
    2 projects | /r/csharp | 3 Apr 2023
  • Stupid Fast Scoop Search v1.0
    18 projects | /r/rust | 29 Oct 2022
  • The scoop on Windows running Perl
    1 project | /r/perl | 28 Oct 2022
  • In support of single binary executable packages
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Mar 2022
    As I see it, part of the drive behind tools like Scoop is to overcome the limitations of the binary-shipping strategy common to Windows developers. They are successful at this, I agree, but only partially successful. They come from the tradition of programs like Ninite, which were explicitly built as ways to make the binary approach suck less than it did before.

    I see the success of these programs as essentially stemming from the insertion of user interests in the form of a maintainer-like process. Sure, they're still working with the binaries, but the actual process of installing and managing these binaries is controlled by users, for users: https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Main/tree/master/bucket

    This means that you get moderation and in many cases modification to the behavior of the program. In a freeware environment like Windows that's full of shitware, at the very least you can in many cases strip out the ads. That's absolutely not nothing, but at the end of the day it comes from a group of user-maintainers stepping up and saying to developers that no, you cannot simply do whatever you want on my system with your software. That's ... sort of the whole point of a software distribution, in the Linux world!

    When I want the latest version of a CLI tool on Linux, I simply `pacman -S package`. That's it; one command. I don't see how it could be any simpler or better than that, and on top of that I'm getting the benefits of moderation and integration with the rest of my system. Perhaps you are emphasizing latest version here, and hinting that you don't get that on Linux distros? That depends entirely on the distro; a software distribution is (roughly) a collection of user interests. An Arch user wants (and gets) the latest versions of all upstream software. A Debian user does not want this or see constant updating to the latest version as an advantage, so that's not what they get.

  • AVR GCC Toolchain - Setup for Windows
    3 projects | /r/embedded | 20 Jan 2022
    Here is the definition: https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Main/blob/master/bucket/avr-gcc.json
  • WinGet is terrible. I want AppGet back
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Apr 2021
    Those are all automated by the auto-update script.

    Check Merged PRs https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Main/pulls?q=is%3Apr+sort%... and you will see that the last non-bot one was merged 17 days ago.

meson

Posts with mentions or reviews of meson. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-09-22.
  • Which Build Tool for a Bootstrappable Project?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Apr 2024
    [1]: https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/8153
  • Building Waybar fails
    1 project | /r/hyprland | 26 Nov 2023
    The Meson build system Version: 1.2.3 Source dir: /home/patrik/workspace/Waybar Build dir: /home/patrik/workspace/Waybar/build Build type: native build Project name: waybar Project version: 0.9.24 C compiler for the host machine: cc (gcc 13.2.0 "cc (Debian 13.2.0-5) 13.2.0") C linker for the host machine: cc ld.bfd 2.41 C++ compiler for the host machine: c++ (gcc 13.2.0 "c++ (Debian 13.2.0-5) 13.2.0") C++ linker for the host machine: c++ ld.bfd 2.41 Host machine cpu family: x86_64 Host machine cpu: x86_64 Compiler for C++ supports link arguments -lc++fs: NO Compiler for C++ supports link arguments -lc++experimental: NO Compiler for C++ supports link arguments -lstdc++fs: YES Program git found: YES (/usr/bin/git) WARNING: You should add the boolean check kwarg to the run_command call. It currently defaults to false, but it will default to true in future releases of meson. See also: https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/9300 Has header "filesystem" : YES Checking if "nl_langinfo with _NL_TIME_WEEK_1STDAY, _NL_TIME_FIRST_WEEKDAY" : links: YES Run-time dependency threads found: YES Found pkg-config: /usr/bin/pkg-config (1.8.1) Run-time dependency fmt found: YES 9.1.0 Run-time dependency spdlog found: YES 1.12.0 Run-time dependency wayland-client found: YES 1.22.0 Run-time dependency wayland-cursor found: YES 1.22.0 Run-time dependency wayland-protocols found: YES 1.32 Run-time dependency gtkmm-3.0 found: YES 3.24.8 Run-time dependency dbusmenu-gtk3-0.4 found: YES 16.04.0 Run-time dependency gio-unix-2.0 found: YES 2.78.1 Run-time dependency jsoncpp found: YES 1.9.4 Run-time dependency sigc++-2.0 found: YES 2.12.1 Found CMake: /usr/bin/cmake (3.27.7) Run-time dependency libinotify found: NO (tried pkgconfig and cmake) Run-time dependency epoll-shim found: NO (tried pkgconfig and cmake) Run-time dependency libinput found: YES 1.23.0 Run-time dependency libnl-3.0 found: YES 3.7.0 Run-time dependency libnl-genl-3.0 found: YES 3.7.0 Run-time dependency upower-glib found: YES 1.90.2 Run-time dependency libpipewire-0.3 found: YES 0.3.85 Run-time dependency playerctl found: YES 2.4.1 Run-time dependency libpulse found: YES 16.1 Run-time dependency libudev found: YES 252 Run-time dependency libevdev found: YES 1.13.1 Run-time dependency libmpdclient found: YES 2.20 Run-time dependency xkbregistry found: YES 1.6.0 Run-time dependency jack found: YES 0.126.0 Run-time dependency wireplumber-0.4 found: YES 0.4.15 Library sndio found: YES Checking for function "sioctl_open" with dependency -lsndio: YES Run-time dependency gtk-layer-shell-0 found: YES 0.8.1 Run-time dependency systemd found: YES 252 Computing int of "__cpp_lib_chrono" : 201611 Configuring waybar.service using configuration Run-time dependency cava found: NO (tried pkgconfig and cmake) Looking for a fallback subproject for the dependency cava Executing subproject cava cava| Project name: cava cava| Project version: 0.9.1 cava| C compiler for the host machine: cc (gcc 13.2.0 "cc (Debian 13.2.0-5) 13.2.0") cava| C linker for the host machine: cc ld.bfd 2.41 cava| Has header "iniparser.h" : NO cava| Has header "iniparser4/iniparser.h" : NO Message: cava is not found. Building waybar without cava subprojects/cava-0.9.1/meson.build:65:3: ERROR: Problem encountered: iniparser library is required A full log can be found at /home/patrik/workspace/Waybar/build/meson-logs/meson-log.txt WARNING: Running the setup command as `meson [options]` instead of `meson setup [options]` is ambiguous and deprecated.
  • How to find a list of all gcc errors/warnings?
    1 project | /r/C_Programming | 4 Oct 2023
    As it happens, I recently landed a PR in meson to add a clang-like Weverything mode that includes all of that, so you can get a minimal list of more or less all GCC warnings, organized by version, from the meson source here: https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/blob/710a753c78077220b13a9f7e999dcdb61339efb1/mesonbuild/compilers/mixins/gnu.py
  • Makefile Tutorial
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Sep 2023
    Came here to post the same. The answer for How to build software? is Meson[1] for C and C++ and also other languages. Works well on Windows and Mac, too.

    I’ve written a small Makefile to learn the basic and backgrounds. Make is fine. But the next high-level would have been Autotools, which is an intimidating and weird set of tools. Most new stuff written in C/C++ use now Meson and it feels sane.

    [1] https://mesonbuild.com

  • CMake x make?
    2 projects | /r/C_Programming | 20 Sep 2023
    If you are very fortunate, you'll be able to choose something else. I like meson myself: it looks a bit like python, it's popular, small, simple, well-documented, easy to install and update, and it works well everywhere.
  • C++ Papercuts
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Aug 2023
    I suggest changing the build tool. Meson improved C and C++ a lot:

    https://mesonbuild.com/

    The dependency declaration and auto-detection is nice. But the hidden extra is WrapDB, built-in package management (if wanted):

        https://mesonbuild.com/Wrap-dependency-system-manual.html
  • A Modern C Development Environment
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Aug 2023
    > C's only REAL problem (in my opinion) which is the lack of dependency management. Most everything else can be done with a makefile and a half decent editor.

    Care to hear about our lord and saviour Meson?

    Both of your quoted problems are mutually incompatible: dependency management isn't the job of the compiler, it's a job for the build or host system. If you want to keep writing makefiles, be prepared to write your own `wget` and `git` invocations to download subprojects.

    Meanwhile, Meson solves the dependency management problem in a way that makes both developers and system integrators/distributions happy. It forces you to make a project that doesn't have broken inter-file or header dependency chains and cleans up all the clutter and cruft of a makefile written for any non-trivial project, while making it trivial to integrate other meson projects into your build, let other people integrate your project into theirs, and provides all of the toggles and environment variables distribution developers need to package your library properly. You can really have your cake and eat it too.

    https://mesonbuild.com/

  • cgen: another declarative CMake configuration generator
    7 projects | /r/cpp | 24 Jun 2023
    Other people going down this route seem to end up writing cmake replacements instead. I'm thinking of something like meson here except that meson never intended to transpile to cmake.
  • Makefile vs Cmake - Objective comparison ?
    2 projects | /r/embedded | 11 Jun 2023
  • Installer script for CMake, Ninja, and Meson
    4 projects | /r/bash | 1 Jun 2023
    I thought I would share my custom installer script for the latest GitHub versions of CMake, Ninja, and Meson.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Main and meson you can also consider the following projects:

DalamudPlugins - This repository hosts plugins for XIVLauncher/Dalamud

CMake - Mirror of CMake upstream repository

Shovel-Ash258 - Personal Shovel bucket with a wide variety of applications of all kinds.

ninja - a small build system with a focus on speed

rust-opendingux-test - OpenGL on RG350M demo

SCons

wix3 - WiX Toolset v3.x

Bazel - a fast, scalable, multi-language and extensible build system

Scoop - A command-line installer for Windows.

cmake-init - The missing CMake project initializer

Scoop-Core - Shovel. Alternative, more advanced, and user-friendly implementation of windows command-line installer scoop.

BitBake - The official bitbake Git is at https://git.openembedded.org/bitbake/. Do not open issues or file pull requests here.