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The case against Makefiles
(thibaud.space)
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this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2026
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Programming
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How many years has it been since you last used CMake?
CMake suffers from some of the same perception issues as C++. A lot of the criticism usually boils down to the designers prioritizing backwards compatibility, a thing even critics would agree is a good thing. As an example, the OP shows a CMake and Meson snippet. The CMake one is 3 lines, the Meson one is 2. The extra line in the CMake sample is a version declaration for backwards compatibility, but the rest are identical.
If you look past your preconceived notions, you'll find that CMake is a good build system and very easy to use. It's also one of the few that fully supports C++20 modules today.
It's by no means a silver bullet, and the generator-based design isn't always the best choice, but its undoubtedly the best choice for the vast majority of C or C++ projects.
Out of curiosity, why do you consider CMake to be the better choice compared to Meson?
Personally I landed on Meson a few years ago, from what I remember chiefly due to simply not liking CMake's DSL and finding Meson easier to work with, despite needing to target a pretty old version for the sake of compatibility. Though Meson is definitely not perfect either; it's highly opinionated, and for example only recently got support for custom build targets putting stuff in sub-directories (as I discovered while writing this comment), so I'll personally be stuck with my workarounds for a good while longer
I was never convinced by Meson's value proposition. From what I remember, it was always just meant to reinvent CMake with a different DSL. Like, literally just CMake but slightly different.
I understand CMake's DSL isn't the prettiest, but as far as improving ergonomics of a build system, minimizing the amount of build scripts you write is far more effective than changing the syntax. If you find yourself writing too much CMake in a project, then switching to a build system with a different design (eg Bazel, Scons, Waf, ...) is probably the better choice.
And of course, since Meson is just a CMake clone, it's always going to be compared to it, and its always going to have to compete on features. On that front, CMake has always been ahead, and I don't see that changing. So in the end, Meson is just another example of that one XKCD meme about standards.
Thank you for the answer!
I have not previously heard Meson described as a reinvention of Cmake or a CMake clone, nor that it was meant to be. I would think that Meson being as opinionated as it is, including for example the fact that it does not and will not support user-defined functions, precludes it from being a CMake clone. It seems instead to be a build-system with a rather different philosophy and feature-set compared to Cmake. But if that philosophy or that feature-set does not match your needs, then there's obviously no reason to pick it over CMake