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I really want to like Meson, but with the lack of user-defined functions [0, 1] (even restricted) it seems difficult to use for larger projects.

How do people handle repetitive patterns in practice? By extending Meson itself?

[0]: https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/3234

[1]: https://mesonbuild.com/FAQ.html#why-doesnt-meson-have-user-d...

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When qemu adopted Meson they spent a lot of developer effort extending Meson, so I guess that's the answer. Unfortunately it means you need Meson >= some high version to compile qemu which had some knock-on effects elsewhere (like not being able to use older distros).

QEMU can be built on older distros even though it requires fairly new Meson, because Meson is easy to embed in the QEMU tarbell's (and in the repo as a submodule).

The port only required two custom-developed features, though. Contributing those was a minor piece of the whole effort.

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