What is the Meson Build system website (mesonbuild.com)?

Updated

mesonbuild.com is the official documentation site for Meson, an open source build system designed to be extremely fast and as user-friendly as possible. If you are evaluating build tools, learning Meson, or looking for its manuals and community channels, this site is the primary reference. The site itself is documentation and community information, not a hosted build service or a commercial product.

What Meson is

Meson is a build system: it takes your project's build definition and drives compilers and other tools to produce binaries. Its stated design point is that time spent writing or debugging build definitions is wasted, and so is time spent waiting for the build system to start compiling. Two consequences follow from that:

  • Build definitions are written in a readable, non-Turing-complete DSL, which limits what build files can do and keeps them declarative.
  • The system is optimized for fast full and incremental builds without sacrificing correctness.

It also ships a built-in multiplatform dependency provider that works together with distro packages.

What the website provides

The site is organized around documentation and entry points rather than a product funnel. The main sections are:

Section What it covers
Overview What Meson is and its design goals
Features Platform, language, and capability summary
Quickstart for beginners A guide aimed at absolute beginners to programming
Tutorials Get it, build a Gtk app from scratch, build an SDL app from scratch, "How do I do X in Meson?"
Manual Usage manual, API reference manual, modules documentation, FAQ, release notes

There are also subpages linked from the site, including an absolute beginner's guide to installing and using Meson, a getting-started quickstart, a simplest tutorial, a simple SDL2 GUI tutorial, the user manual, the reference manual, reference tables, style recommendations for Meson files, and a Meson file rewriter for automatic modifications.

Features at a glance

According to the site, Meson offers:

  • Multiplatform support for Linux, macOS, and Windows, across GCC, Clang, Visual Studio, and others.
  • Supported languages including C, C++, C#, D, Fortran, Java, and Rust.
  • Build definitions in a very readable, user-friendly, non-Turing-complete DSL.
  • Cross compilation for many operating systems as well as bare metal.
  • A built-in multiplatform dependency provider that works together with distro packages.

Community and development

Development happens on the GitHub project, and contribution instructions are on the contribution page. No CLA is required to contribute; the release process is documented separately.

For discussion, the site points to the #mesonbuild channel via Matrix (web interface) or OFTC IRC, and to the Discussions section of the Meson GitHub repository for general discussion.

Who should use this site

  • New to build systems entirely: start with the beginner guide and the quickstart, which assume no prior programming background.
  • Evaluating Meson against another build tool: read the Features section and the language/platform list to check coverage for your stack.
  • Already using Meson: go straight to the usage manual, API reference, modules documentation, FAQ, and release notes.
  • Converting an existing project: the site notes that projects already using Meson are a useful resource for seeing what to do and what not to do when converting, and links a short list of Meson users.

The site does not state pricing or login requirements for Meson itself; it is described as open source, and the documentation is presented openly.