To start a new project today using plain GNU Make like the author of the article recommends, is not a good idea unless you enjoy fiddling with the build.
Not comparable at all.
The difference is Cargo is the official standard package manager of the Rust language. Meson is one among the sea of incompatible build systems for the C language.
As with the lesson gofmt taught, you must supply the basic feature in the box. Humans are lazy, so if it doesn't come in the box only people who know they can't live without it will even bother, put it in the box and only people who can't live with it will remove it.
That's not a distinction I care about. The tooling around a language should be a part of discussing the merits of a language. Your language can be the most ergonomic language in the world, but if all your development gains are lost fiddling with build tools, you haven't gained anything.
> Have you tried using a more modern tool like Meson?
I haven't, but now that I know about it, I'll give it a try. Thanks for the info! It looks promising.
> To start a new project today using plain GNU Make like the author of the article recommends, is not a good idea unless you enjoy fiddling with the build.
Maybe, but that just brings up the problem that there isn't really a clear second-tier system outside the standard library for tools. Certain tools (i.e. Valgrind) are well-known, but there are a million different ways to install a million different tools and for most things it's ultimately more common to just roll your own.
But being able to print "make: ** No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop." to stderr isn't particularly useful, and having to write a Makefile is a significant barrier.