Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeremyjh | Hacker News Reader

I just looked at one example...Wayland's meson.build is 142 LOC, but build.zig is 581.

https://github.com/allyourcodebase/wayland/blob/master/build... https://github.com/wayland-mirror/wayland/blob/main/meson.bu...

View on HN

The meson build is across multiple files, you should add together:

  meson.build
  meson_options.txt
  doc/meson.build
  egl/meson.build
  src/meson.build
  tests/meson.build
  cursor/meson.build
  doc/doxygen/meson.build
  doc/publican/meson.build
  doc/doxygen/xml/meson.build
  doc/publican/sources/meson.build
  doc/doxygen/xml/Client/meson.build
  doc/doxygen/xml/Server/meson.build

Well then, nevermind.

The build.zig doesn't build anything from the doc or tests folders. Otherwise, yeah.

The Zig is far more explicit about what it is doing with lots of very long dotted commands for specifiy version headers and such, so maybe not super fair unless you like magic.

Whats an example of magic in the meson.build that you don't understand? I think this is the first meson.build I've ever looked at and it seems very straightforward.

Didn't say I didn't understand it, I just said it was less explicit. Read through the Zig and it is super clear what every step is doing, and it sets things much more explicitly than the meson build

``` const wayland_version_header = b.addConfigHeader(.{ .style = .{ .cmake = upstream.path("src/wayland-version.h.in") }, }, .{ .WAYLAND_VERSION_MAJOR = @as(i64, @intCast(version.major)), .WAYLAND_VERSION_MINOR = @as(i64, @intCast(version.minor)), .WAYLAND_VERSION_MICRO = @as(i64, @intCast(version.patch)), .WAYLAND_VERSION = b.fmt("{f}", .{version}), });

```

which is doing some config automake work. Which Meson does implicitly(magically).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com