Re: [Meson-devel] Meson can now compile Qt Creator

[Jussi P. <jpa...@gm...>]

On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 8:39 AM, james <ja...@ma...> wrote:

Does this mean that meson will gain understanding of code generation
> chains, with moc?
>

Meson already has that. See for example the manual:

https://sourceforge.net/p/meson/wiki/Generating%20sources/

It should be noted that Qt5's moc is special cased into Meson because it is
so common. This reduces the amount of boilerplate people need to write.

The one that interests me happens to be:
>
> IDL file (containing ODL) (tool: midl)
>  -> TLB file (referenced from RC file, tool: rc)
>   -> RES file (tool: cvtres)
>    -> OBJ file
>
> which is a chain used in building COM DLLs.
>

Currently Meson has the limitation that you can't use the output of
generated source as input to a second generator command. You can work
around this by writing a simple script that does all your generator steps
in one go and then call that. So something like this:

mygen = find_program('myscript.bat')

gen = generator(myget,
 outputs  : ['@BASENAME@.TLB', '@BASENAME@.RES', '@BASENAME@.obj'],
 arguments : ['@INPUT@', '@BUILD_DIR@'])

Ideally I'd like a build system that will build for 32 and 64 bit targets
> at the same time.
>

Currently this is not possible, but you can have multiple build directories
for the same source code, one for 32 and one for 64 bits.

The reason this can't be done is that I have not had to deal with this
issue personally, so I don't know what would be the best practice would be.


> There are other use cases I'm interested in too, where we
> compile-the-compiler and then run it (typically to generate code from a
> DSL).  Do you build the moc compiler as part of this?


I don't build moc but it is possible. Meson's source code has a unit test
for this, even:

https://sourceforge.net/p/meson/code/ci/master/tree/test%20cases/common/29%20pipeline/