muon

muon is an implementation of the meson build system in c99 with minimal dependencies.

Features

• muon analyze - a static analyzer and language server for meson.build files.
• muon fmt - a meson.build code formatter
• An interactive stepping debugger
• A built-in cross platform ninja implementation
• fast
• Compiles to a single portable binary available for linux, windows, and macOS.

Status

muon is close to feature-complete with meson for c-like languages: c, c++, objc, objc++. Support for other languages is planned.

See the Muon Reference for more detailed information.

Things missing include:

• some niche options such as -Dunity and -Dlayout have no effect
• some dependencies with custom logic hardcoded in meson don't yet have the same treatment in muon
• some less common meson modules
• most language support for non c-like languages

Other differences from meson are described in the Muon Docs.

If you want to contribute, try using muon to build your favorite project. Patches and bug reports welcome!

Muon runs CI on all major desktop platforms. CI status may be viewed on muon's ci dashboard.

Dependencies

Essential:

• A c99 compatible toolchain

For pkgconfig support:

• A pkg-config binary
• Or libpkgconf (-Dlibpkgconf=enabled)

For [wrap-file] support:

• libcurl
• libarchive

To build documentation:

• scdoc for muon.1 and meson.build.5
• python3 and py3-yaml for docs imported from the meson project

To run most project tests:

• python3

Install

If you already have meson or muon and are not interested in bootstrapping, you can just do a typical meson configure, build, install:

$meson setup build
cd build
ninja build
$meson test
$meson install

Otherwise, you must bootstrap muon.

The bootstrapping process has two stages. The first stage produces a muon binary capable of building itself (but not necessarily anything else). The second stage produces the final binary.

Stage 1:

./bootstrap.sh build

This will by default build a ninja implementation (samu) into the resulting executable. To disable this behavior use CFLAGS=-DBOOTSTRAP_NO_SAMU. This only disables samurai for muon-bootstrap. To disable samurai in the final muon executable use the standard option -Dsamurai=disabled.

Stage 2:

build/muon-bootstrap setup build
build/muon-bootstrap -C build samu
build/muon -C build test -R
build/muon -C build install

Contribute

Please refer to the contributing guide before sending patches. Send patches on the mailing list or PRs on github, report issues on the issue tracker or github_issues, and discuss in #muon on libera.chat.

License

muon is generally licensed under the GPL version 3. For a more detailed breakdown, each file contains license and copyright information at the top. All referenced licenses can be found in the LICENSES directory.

Credits

Although I had already had the idea to re-implement meson in C, I was initially inspired to actually go out and do it when I saw boson. muon's code was originally based on boson, though has since been almost completely rewritten.