Re: [gentoo-dev] cmake + ninja vs autotools

[William L. Thomson Jr.]

On Thu, 16 Nov 2017 09:17:52 -0700
Christoph Junghans <junghans@g.o> wrote:
>
> > Ninja doesn't support Fortran as well.
> Besides not supporting the full feature set.

That does not seem to be effecting meson. Which only supports ninja.
A considerable amount of projects are switching to meson, look around.
I have switched over a couple projects I am working on. I have worked
with all three, autotools, cmake, and meson. I prefer cmake + ninja.

The performance  of meson vs cmake is negligible. Given cmake cpack, I
prefer that for now over meson. I could not make a strong case for
speed of cmake vs meson. That is moot speed wise, pretty equal. Meson
maybe a tad faster.

> Ninja vs make didn't seem to make big time difference (for cmake at
> least). Back in 2013 ago only found a 40sec difference (of an 6.5 min
> overall build) when building kdelibs averaging over 3 builds, which
> had more than 40s scatter in the individual builds.

It is making huge differences in other projects. I have seen
considerable time savings in the smaller projects I am working on,
ecrire, entrance, clipboard, and some others.

Enlightenment desktop for 0.23 release will have dropped autotools
entirely for meson. 0.22 already ships with meson. I switched over and
it builds faster. No problems there with ninja. I think EFL may switch
to meson as well. Other E projects like rage have already.

> That coincides with my own experience outside of portage where ninja
> and make are pretty much even for a full build, but ninja is much
> faster in figuring out which parts to rebuild in a partial build.

Maybe time to check again. My experience says otherwise. I can switch
over some stuff in travis and show via CI the difference in time. I see
it all the time in development doing routine builds as part of code,
build, test, code, etc. Rinse and repeat.

-- 
William L. Thomson Jr.