Style recommendations

This page lists some recommendations on organizing and formatting your Meson build files.

Tabs or spaces?

Always spaces. Two spaces is the most common.

Trailing commas?

Yes, where possible. They help make nicer diffs in version control systems.

Naming Variable

Snake case (stylized as snake_case) refers to the style of writing in which each space is replaced by an underscore (_) character, and the first letter of each word written in lowercase. It is the most common naming convention used in Meson build scripts as identifiers for variable.

Let say you would like to refer to your executable so something like my_exe.

Dependency usage

The dependency function is the recommended way to handle dependencies. If your wrap files have the necessary [provide] entries, everything will work automatically both when compiling your own and when using system dependencies.

You should only need subproject when you need to extract non dependencies/programs.

Naming options

There are two ways of naming project options. As an example for booleans the first one is foo and the second one is enable-foo. The former style is recommended, because in Meson options have strong type, rather than being just strings.

You should try to name options the same as is common in other projects. This is especially important for yielding options, because they require that both the parent and subproject options have the same name.

Global arguments

Prefer add_project_arguments to add_global_arguments because using the latter prevents using the project as a subproject.

Cross compilation arguments

Try to keep cross compilation arguments away from your build files as much as possible. Keep them in the cross file instead. This adds portability, since all changes needed to compile to a different platform are isolated in one place.

Sorting source paths

The source file arrays should all be sorted. This makes it easier to spot errors and often reduces merge conflicts. Furthermore, the paths should be sorted with a natural sorting algorithm, so that numbers are sorted in an intuitive way (1, 2, 3, 10, 20 instead of 1, 10, 2, 20, 3).

Numbers should also be sorted before characters (a111 before ab0). Furthermore, strings should be sorted case insensitive.

Additionally, if a path contains a directory it should be sorted before normal files. This rule also applies recursively for subdirectories.

The following example shows correct source list definition:

sources = files(
  'aaa/a1.c',
  'aaa/a2.c',
  'bbb/subdir1/b1.c',
  'bbb/subdir2/b2.c',
  'bbb/subdir10/b3.c',
  'bbb/subdir20/b4.c',
  'bbb/b5.c',
  'bbb/b6.c',
  'f1.c',
  'f2.c',
  'f10.c',
  'f20.c',
)