Software Alternatives & Reviews

Meson VS GNU Make

Compare Meson VS GNU Make and see what are their differences

Meson logo Meson

Meson is an open source build system meant to be both extremely fast, and, even more importantly...

GNU Make logo GNU Make

GNU Make is a tool which controls the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the program's source files.
  • Meson Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-03-04
  • GNU Make Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-12

Meson videos

Meson RTA by Newgen Vape - Flavour Banger - Review & Rebuild

More videos:

  • Tutorial - MESON RTA by NEWGEN - Review & Build Tutorial!
  • Review - NewGen Vape Meson RTA Review - ...it's all down to the price...

GNU Make videos

No GNU Make videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Meson and GNU Make)
Front End Package Manager
JavaScript Package Manager
JS Build Tools
42 42%
58% 58
Continuous Integration
48 48%
52% 52

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Meson seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 43 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Meson mentions (43)

  • Rust Without Crates.io
    I went to mesonbuild.org and it doesn't match the description (some sort of betting site? I didn't stick around ...), and a search turned up: https://mesonbuild.com/. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • Makefile Tutorial
    Came here to post the same. The answer for How to build software? is Meson[1] for C and C++ and also other languages. Works well on Windows and Mac, too. I’ve written a small Makefile to learn the basic and backgrounds. Make is fine. But the next high-level would have been Autotools, which is an intimidating and weird set of tools. Most new stuff written in C/C++ use now Meson and it feels sane. [1]... - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
  • CMake x make?
    If you are very fortunate, you'll be able to choose something else. I like meson myself: it looks a bit like python, it's popular, small, simple, well-documented, easy to install and update, and it works well everywhere. Source: 8 months ago
  • C++ Papercuts
    I suggest changing the build tool. Meson improved C and C++ a lot: https://mesonbuild.com/ The dependency declaration and auto-detection is nice. But the hidden extra is WrapDB, built-in package management (if wanted):
        https://mesonbuild.com/Wrap-dependency-system-manual.html.
    - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • A Modern C Development Environment
    > C's only REAL problem (in my opinion) which is the lack of dependency management. Most everything else can be done with a makefile and a half decent editor. Care to hear about our lord and saviour Meson? Both of your quoted problems are mutually incompatible: dependency management isn't the job of the compiler, it's a job for the build or host system. If you want to keep writing makefiles, be prepared to write... - Source: Hacker News / 9 months ago
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GNU Make mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of GNU Make yet. Tracking of GNU Make recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Meson and GNU Make, you can also consider the following products

Ninja Build - Ninja is a small build system with a focus on speed.

CMake - CMake is an open-source, cross-platform family of tools designed to build, test and package software.

SCons - SCons is an Open Source software construction tool—that is, a next-generation build tool.

Apache Maven - Apache Maven is a project comprehension and management software tool.

npm - npm is a package manager for Node.

SBT - SBT is a build tool for Scala, like Ant or Maven but with hieroglyphics.