Re: [Vala] Potential Vala build system change (switch to Meson)

[Al Thomas <astavale yahoo co uk>]

> On Thursday, August 17, 2017, 9:34:13 PM GMT+1, Dmitry Golovin <dima golovin in> wrote:

> As far as I know, Meson support building Vala code and it should not be too difficult to change > the build 
> system to Meson. Anyone working on it already? Is there a bug open for build system > migration?
There is an unstable branch here: https://git.gnome.org/browse/vala/log/?h=wip%2Fmeson
You should definitely try it out. It is much much faster at building from a fresh start. About 15 seconds for 
Meson/Ninja compare to 2 and a half minutes with autotools on my system. The branch is unstable - there are 
forced pushes to it - so don't rely on it for contributing. It builds the binaries for Vala fine, but the 
test suite is still a work in progress. Getting the test suite working well would be a big improvement for 
the contributor experience to Vala. Maybe for 0.38. We'll see. There are also problems with generating VAPIs 
and other targets, but that is a lower priority.
There is also a tracking page on the wiki: 
https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala/DeveloperDocumentation/MesonAlthough I haven't updated it yet with the 
recent work by ricotz.
You should also note Meson 0.42 is out! This adds support for: - Genie - coloured diagnostics from valac 
0.37.1+ (thanks Ben Iofel, MarvinW and Rico Tzschichholz) - VALAC and VAPIGEN set by environment variables
The approach to testing is the main problem at present. It would be nice to integrate the automatic test 
discovery from the valadate work along with TAP reporting and XFAIL tests into the Meson branch. That 
probably needs some significant patches to Meson.

Meson is giving a very nice Vala experience. With great speed from ninja and useful extensions such as 
gnome.compile_resources() and gnome.generate_gir(). So give it a whirl for your own projects too.

Al