Using with Visual Studio

In order to generate Visual Studio projects, Meson needs to know the settings of your installed version of Visual Studio. The only way to get this information is to run Meson under the Visual Studio Command Prompt.

You can always find the Visual Studio Command Prompt by searching from the Start Menu. However, the name is different for each Visual Studio version. With Visual Studio 2019, look for "x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2019". The next steps are the same as always:

1. cd into your source directory
2. meson setup builddir, which will create and setup the build directory
3. meson compile -C builddir, to compile your code. You can also use ninja -C builddir here if you are using the default Ninja backend.

If you wish to generate Visual Studio project files, pass --backend vs. At the time of writing the Ninja backend is more mature than the VS backend so you might want to use it for serious work.

Using Clang-CL with Visual Studio

(new in 0.52.0)

You will first need to get a copy of llvm+clang for Windows, such versions are available from a number of sources, including the llvm website. Then you will need the llvm toolset extension for visual studio. You then need to either use a native file or set CC=clang-cl, and set CXX=clang-cl to use those compilers, Meson will do the rest.

This only works with visual studio 2017 and 2019.

There is currently no support in Meson for clang/c2.

Using Intel-CL (ICL) with Visual Studio

(new in 0.52.0)

To use ICL you need only have ICL installed and launch an ICL development shell like you would for the ninja backend and Meson will take care of it.