Meson build system

[dimmus]

Not sure, but it might be worth switching to meson build system. Eflete is not a huge package, so the compilation speed is not extremely critical issue.

Personally, i like good old autotools.

[dimmus]

Made some initial commits in separate meson branch.

[dimmus]

Have a huge passion to try the acr as well.

ACR tries to replace autoconf functionality generating a full-compatible 'configure' script (runtime flags). But using shell-script instead of m4. This means that ACR is faster, smaller and easy to use.

[eli-schwartz]

From a quick look at your meson branch I think it can be simplified a lot. At least the following:

• autotools defined a lot of config.h PACKAGE_* defines by default, but you do not actually use them so just don't bother? All you need basically is PACKAGE_NAME alone.
• eflete_cargs = '-fvisibility=hidden' and checking if the compiler supports it is not necessary, you can use Meson's gnu_symbol_visibility: 'hidden' kwarg and Meson will handle this for you
• in all cases where you use == true, you're checking if a function that returns a boolean, is equal to boolean true. if true == true then evaluates and returns the value true, and if true runs the code inside that block; you can just use if func('thing') e.g. if cc.has_argument(cf)
• cc.has_argument in a loop can be simplified to cc.get_supported_arguments() which returns a list of the supported ones. eflete_cflags = cc.get_supported_arguments(eflete_cflags_try)
• source files for a target do not have to include the header files, Meson figures this out anyway. autotools doesn't really need this information either, except that dist breaks if you don't include it
• c_args: [..., '-I' + join_paths(meson.source_root(), 'src/bin/alloc'), ...] should just be include_directories: [..., 'src/bin/alloc', ...], you can avoid specifying the current source directory

[dimmus]

Eli, thanks. Highly informative. Certainly, i take a look.

You leveled up my meson skills :)

[eli-schwartz]

No problem :) I'm happy to give a more thorough review as that branch progresses, feel free to ping me.

[dimmus]

Fully switched to meson build system. Done! Time to think about meson wrap support.