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Comment by mkobit | Hacker News Reader

> There's a reason Meson is winning the latest build-systems war:

What do you mean by winning? I haven't heard of Meson until the last few weeks, and I haven't seen it consumed by any open source projects on GitHub, although my search biases more towards JVM things anyways.

> it only depends on python3 & ninja

I don't see how depending on both Python3 and Ninja is any less dependencies than the JVM. Python3 isn't really available by default on most distributions (maybe that is changing soon), so there is still the overhead of installing it, right? Public CI systems like Travis CI and Circle CI have images that make having a JDK easy.

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See https://youtu.be/gHdTzdXkhRY?t=8m4s for a list of high-profile projects that have moved or are moving to meson.

While my parent comment is over-simplifying, the talk goes into more details on the strengths of Meson.

Also, I'm not saying there's no open-source community around JVM-based projects. Just that adding it as a dependency is a very expensive decision to make. Python3 is pre-installed in major distros (e.g in Fedora/Ubuntu/Arch), and the binary package for ninja is about 300k installed here. Python3 is about 10m; openjdk is about 100M. Then the runtime requirements the article talks about add up.

I wasn't aware that Python3 was pre-installed on major distros, I don't believe it was by default on my Ubuntu 16.04. It is possibly I removed it, though. It does look like 18.04 is going to bundle Python 3 [1]. I agree with you that adding JVM is an expensive decision and the runtime requirements can make using them in real projects a big pain.

Thanks for the video, I'll check it out. It is exciting (and I would also say a bit worrying) to see a lot of competing tools in this area.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Python/Python36Transition

2018 and 2019 is when you'll start to see all the distros with an enterprise support lifecycle (RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu LTS, SLES, probably others I'm forgetting) start to move more heavily to Python 3, since Python 2's EOL is in 2020. As your link notes, Ubuntu and Debian are trying to make their next long-term supported stable releases use 3.x as the default Python.

Looking to the following iteration, any distro releasing in 2020 with Python 2.7 as default and a support lifecycle greater than 6-9 months, doing so after 2020 regardless of lifecycle, will be irresponsible. I doubt any of the major ones will overlook this, not even those which target hobbyists instead of enterprises.

(Disclaimer: While I am a Debian developer, I have no personal involvement in this transition for Debian or any other distro.)

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