One obvious issue with Meson is that it's not really available as a (statically-compiled, if you want) binary. I was an early adopter (years and years ago) of

One obvious issue with Meson is that it's not really available as a (statically-compiled, if you want) binary. I was an early adopter (years and years ago) of Scons, but the Python dependency turned out to be an absolute disaster, purely in terms of infrastructure (especially that everybody had to have a lot of "things" installed). While CMake isn't exactly great, a) it is reasonably understandable, and b) the boost build system was essentially a single-project-build system, and c) it's a huge improvement over autoconf, and d) it doesn't need a lot of infrastructure aside from what ships with it (to contrast with 'interpreted' build systems).