The Meson 1.7.0 assembly system has been published, used for projects such as X.org Server, Mesa, Qemu, Lighttpd, Systemd, Gstreamer, Wayland, Gnome, and GTK. Meson’s code is written in Python and is licensed under Apache 2.0.
The primary aim of Meson’s development is to optimize the assembly process for speed while ensuring ease of use. By default, Meson utilizes Ninja tools instead of the MAKE utility, although other backends like Xcode and Visual Studio are supported. The system includes a versatile dependency processor that facilitates packaging for distributions. The assembly rules are written in a simplified domain-specific language for user-friendly readability and efficiency.
Cross-compilation and assembly are supported in various operating systems, including Linux, Illumos/Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Dragonfly BSD, Haiku, MacOS, and Windows, using compilers like GCC, Clang, and Visual Studio. Projects in languages like C, C++, Fortran, Java, and Rust can be built using Meson, with a incremental build mode that only updates components affected by recent changes, ensuring reproducible builds.
The main innovations in Meson 1.7 include:
- Added ‘Depends (‘atomic’)’ design for C++ to verify the presence of the atomic library with atomic operations.
- Introduced ‘Linear Asm’ programming language support, particularly the TI ASM dialect compatible with the TI C6000 compiler.
- Added support for Rust 2024 edition (rust_std = 2024) to be included in the Rust 1.85.0 compiler release.
- Supported the Tasking VX-TOOLSET compiler for the CPU Tricore family.
- Enabled the running of Lint-Clippy on Rust projects.
- Improved dependency setup for Cargo, ensuring proper determination of dependencies and capabilities to prevent issues with ‘Default_OPTIONS’ parameter.
- In the