Meson Build File Examples

Meson, like many projects, has documentation that is heavy on the detail, but weak on the big picture. There are no best practices offered, and questions like "How do I..." require a lot of digging around in the guts.

The opinionated examples in this repository are designed as fully functional "jump start" projects to get you going:

• Building a library
• Building a header-only library
• Building an executable
• Setting up dependencies to other projects
• Testing via google test

Common Features

• Project files are split such that they have a "simple config" section at the top for the most common things you'll want to modify.
• Projects are structured in an opinionated way.
• Public APIs are marked public or private (depending on their internal or external use) via -DMYPROJECT_PUBLIC defines, which handle windows and unix style visibility specifications.
• The project name and version are passed to the compiler as -DPROJECT_NAME and -DPROJECT_VERSION
• Project files are already set up to be used as dependencies of other projects, and as packages.
• The library projects come with example tests.

Building

Requirements:

• Meson 0.49 or newer
• Ninja 1.8.2 or newer
• A C compiler
• A C++ compiler

To build from command line, go into one of the project directories, then:

To initialize the builder:

meson build

To build the project from then on:

ninja -C build

To run the tests:

ninja -C build test

To run the tests with full "google test" reporting:

./build/run_tests

All build files will be put in the build subdir, which is included in .gitignore.

Ideas?

If you have other ideas for making these projects more robust as starting points, please open an issue to discuss it!