meson VS Bazel

With cargo-c I try to use the best practices to support as many platform as possible, trying to stay in sync with what meson does. Sadly what is conceptually trivial, installing a package, has lots of details that are platform-specific.

[1]: https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/8153

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.

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

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

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.

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

> 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/

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.

Many big companies have built their own tools to reign in this complexity and make it easier and faster for developers to work on large, multi-language code bases. Meta has buck, Amazon has brazil, and Google has bazel. But from my experience, especially, with brazil, these tools also have some rough edges, so understanding how they work can go a long way.

Discover Bazel

Wow, if you curl it, there's a lot of boilerplate code there.

Maybe built using Bazel?

https://bazel.build

Bazel by Google

Luckily a feature to limit the disk cache size is in development: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/5139

This is a problem that Bazel (https://bazel.build) solves in a very convenient way. You can just keep using the paths relative to the repository root, and as long as you properly declare your test needs that file it will access it without problems. Or you can use the runfile libraries to access them too.

When doing research for this lab exercise I looked at both vcpkg and conan. Both are package managers that would automate the installation and configuration of my program with its dependencies. However, when it came to releasing and sharing my program my options were limited. For example, the central public registry for conan packages is conan-center, but these packages are curated and the process is very involved. There was no way conan-center would accept a class project like mine. Alternatively, I could host a conan package on a public Artifactory repository, but accessing the package requires users to add the repository to their conan remote. This already sounded like too many steps to expect regular users to follow - I already haven't setup any conan remotes, there's no way I could expect regular users to know about conan remotes, let alone have conan installed on their system. After discussing with people online and consulting my instructor, I ultimately decided to do a GitHub release. However, in the future I was encouraged to look into using CMake or bazel.

NOTE: I won’t mention SBT and Leiningen here because, with all due respect, they are niche build tools. I also won’t discuss Kobalt for the same reason (besides, it’s no longer actively maintained). Additionally, I won’t touch upon Bazel and Buck in this context, mainly because I’m not very familiar with them. If you have insights or comments about these tools, please feel free to share them in the comments 👇