Meson (software)

Meson

Logo since 2019
Meson configuring dav1d
Developer(s)	Jussi Pakkanen
Initial release	2 March 2013; 12 years ago (2013-03-02)
Stable release	1.8.0[1]  / 28 April 2025; 18 days ago (28 April 2025)
Repository	github.com/mesonbuild/meson
Written in	Python
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Software development tools
License	Apache License 2.0
Website	mesonbuild.com

Meson (/ˈmɛ.sɒn/)^[2] is a software build automation tool for building a codebase. Meson adopts a convention over configuration approach to minimize the data required to configure the most common operations.^[3] Meson is free and open-source software under the Apache License 2.0.^[4]

Meson is written in Python and runs on Unix-like (including Linux and macOS), Windows and other operating systems. It supports building C, C++, C#, CUDA, Objective-C, D, Fortran, Java, Rust, and Vala.^[5] It handles dependencies via a mechanism named Wrap. It supports GNU Compiler Collection (gcc), Clang, Visual C++ and other compilers, including non-traditional compilers such as Emscripten and Cython.^[6] The project uses ninja as the primary backend buildsystem, but can also use Visual Studio or Xcode backends.

Meson's support for Fortran and Cython was improved to help various scientific projects in their switch from setuptools to Meson, for example SciPy.^[7] Meson can be used as a PEP517 backend to build Python wheels, via the meson-python package.^[8]