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Playlist "GUADEC 2016"

Making your GNOME app compile 2.4x faster

Nirbheek Chauhan

... with the Meson build system on Linux, and ~15x faster on Windows.

Last year, Jussi Pakkanen (the maintainer of Meson) gave a talk about improving the way GNOME apps are built by replacing Autotools with the Meson build system.

This year, I'll be talking about how we at Centricular worked along exactly those lines and ported GStreamer, GLib, and its core dependencies from Autotools to Meson. Besides the improvements in speed, using Meson provided numerous advantages over Autotools such as cleaner syntax, better cross-platform support, maintainable code, and much more.

I will be talking about our porting journey and make the case that Meson is indeed ready for replacing Autotools in every case we've seen so far. The next step is convincing more projects to try out Meson.