D support for the Meson build system

[Matthias Klumpp via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Monday, 22 August 2016 at 01:34:36 UTC, jkpl wrote:
> On Sunday, 21 August 2016 at 19:08:59 UTC, Matthias Klumpp 
> wrote:
>> for a project like Terminix, dub with LDC builds in 8.6s, 
>> while Meson and ninja take only 6s here.
>
> Did you try to build with DUB but with WIFI or ethernet 
> interface toggled off ?

No, but I obviously excluded any download times, and also 
dependency build-times to be fair to dub.

But, with network access toggled off:

Terminix:
   debug build:
     dub: 0m8.60s
     ninja: 0m6.36s
   release build (standard args):
     dub: 0m12.923s
     ninja: 0m11.740s

asgen:
  debug build:
     dub: 0m13.00s
     ninja: 0m13.04s
  release build:
     dub: 0m25.72s
     ninja: 0m19.19s

I ran these a few times, and the results were comparable, 
although I think if I would perform proper statistics the 
variance would be relatively high. Compiler was LDC 1.0.0 (on a 
Xeon E3-1231 v3).

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.
Also, Ninja knows about all the source files and generated files 
in advance, while dub needs to search for them on every run. That 
of course also has the drawback that one needs to specify the 
source files prior to building in the meson.build file.