D support for the Meson build system

[kinke via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Monday, 22 August 2016 at 11:45:37 UTC, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
> One important thing about Ninja is that it will perform 
> split-builds by default, so if you change something, only the 
> changed piece needs to be recompiled. I *think* dub can do that 
> too, but for some reason it never does it (even when using 
> --parallel).
> That behavior drastically reduces compile times when working on 
> a project.

So if I understand correctly, Meson/Ninja compile each module 
separately, while dub builds them all in a single command line.
This makes quite a big difference. Compiling all at once requires 
a full rebuild every time a single file is modified and implies 
full single-threadedness. The advantages are that each file is 
only loaded and parsed once, but much more importantly, 
everything is emitted into a single object file, allowing for 
implicit full cross-module inlining (across the compiled modules).
So while compiling each file separately in parallel is 
potentially much much faster, the produced release binary may be 
slower due to less/no cross-module inlining (e.g., LDC's option 
is still experimental and known to have issues).