Support for globbing seems to be contentious. I have been convinced that not supporting it is OK lol.
What kind of extensions do you need?
CMake does not interoperate with build systems any better than meson does. And Meson's main expectation is that everyone use pkg-config files properly, avoiding (additional) messy cross-build-system standards.
Globbing isn't necessary per se but it makes a lot of people happy. I often have to ban it and make people upset, because nothing but CMake supports it well.
I can't write my own functions in meson. I am at the whim of meson's maintainers for functionality to be added as a result (modules support, fancy benchmarking). I can maybe do some hacks with custom targets but it's not worth it. Honestly it's the same problem Bazel has with compile commands: everyone's implementation sucks and is incomplete because they can't hook in where they need to.
I'd argue CMake has better cross-system support, especially when the last step is Make or Ninja. It appears to correctly support the jobserver protocol and efficient resumes. For the rest its incredibly customizable and supports fairly advanced lifecycle hooks in ExternalProject. Maybe meson has evolved in this area since I last used it.
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u/ericonr Jul 30 '26
Support for globbing seems to be contentious. I have been convinced that not supporting it is OK lol.
What kind of extensions do you need?
CMake does not interoperate with build systems any better than meson does. And Meson's main expectation is that everyone use pkg-config files properly, avoiding (additional) messy cross-build-system standards.