I watched the Linux.conf.au 2015 video to get a more detailed overview of meson. I think the most interesting feature is that it at least partially tries to ad

I watched the Linux.conf.au 2015 video to get a more detailed overview of meson. I think the most interesting feature is that it at least partially tries to address the problem of building library dependencies, although I don't get the impression that was an emphasis. In particular, the tup build system didn't get mentioned at all, which I find surprising, since IMHO it has broken new ground in build speed, correctness, and ergonomics. I think it hasn't gone viral because it doesn't try to solve most of the language specific problems people are starting to expect build systems to solve. It also doesn't have a very good story for the build specification language, IMHO. I think a bigger issue in build systems is that the open source ecosystem does NOT have a tree structure; you have a big rats nest of dependencies on specific versions because everything is constantly changing. I think we need something like nix, but that is fully distributed, and perhaps piggybacking on git databases (and ssh trust networks) to distribute binary dependencies along with the source.