muon

muon is an implementation of the meson build system in c99 with minimal dependencies.

Non-features

• bug-for-bug compatibility with meson. In fact, muon aspires to be stricter than meson in cases where meson's implementation seems error prone. muon uses the official meson documentation as its specification.
• cli compatibility with meson. muon has different flags, subcommands, etc., and should not be renamed/symlinked to meson.

Other differences from meson are described in doc/differences.md

Features

• muon analyze - a static analyzer for meson.build files. Capable of doing type inference, checking unused variables, undeclared variables, etc.
• muon fmt - a meson.build code formatter
• An interactive stepping debugger with the dbg() function.
• Fast

Status

muon is close to feature-complete (bugs notwithstanding!) with the core of meson for c and c++.

Things missing include:

• cross-compilation support
• build optimizations like pch and unity
• several b_ options
• dependencies with a custom configuration tool
• all modules except for fs and pkgconfig. (a small python module shim is also available)

If you want to contribute, try using muon to build your favorite project. Patches and bug reports welcome!

Dependencies

Bootstrap:

• c99
• ninja-compatible build tool

Bootstrap with libpkgconf support:

• libpkgconf
• pkgconf or pkg-config
• sh

[wrap-file] support:

• libcurl
• libarchive

Documentation:

• scdoc for muon.1 and meson.build.5
• python3
• py3-yaml

Tests:

• python3

Building

The bootstrapping process has two stages. The first stage produces a muon binary capable of building itself (but not necessarily anything else). The second stage produces the final binary.

Stage 1:

mkdir build
c99 -Iinclude src/amalgam.c -o build/muon

However, this version of muon will never be able to look up any dependencies. If are going to need dependency() to work, use the provided bootstrapping script, which links in libpkgconf if it is available.

./bootstrap.sh build

Stage 2:

build/muon setup build
ninja -C build

Testing

build/muon -C build test

muon has a few of its own tests for core language features, but the majority of the tests are copied from the meson project.

Installation

build/muon -C build install

Contributing

Please refer to the contributing guide before sending patches. Send patches on the mailing list, report issues on the issue tracker, and discuss in #muon on libera.chat.

License

muon is licensed under the GPL version 3 (see LICENSE). Tests under tests/project were copied from the meson project tests and are licensed under Apache 2.0.

Credits

Although I had already had the idea to re-implement meson in C, I was initially inspired to actually go out and do it when I saw boson. muon's code was originally based on boson, though has since been almost completely rewritten.