Godot Meson port discussion

[jpakkane]

👋 Welcome!

This area is for discussions for porting the build system of Godot to Meson.

[Xrayez]

I find it essential being able to compile Godot with external custom modules, the support for which I contributed myself in godotengine#36922, which allows to build modules located from anywhere on the filesystem. There are numerous Godot modules that can be compiled using existing buildsystem.

I still think that SCons works fine given Godot's design in general. There are also several PRs by @dmoody256 (SCons contributor) https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pulls/dmoody256 that aim to improve the existing buildsystem, which unfortunately haven't received much attention yet, either.

If you really want to increase the chances of integrating Meson in Godot, please think about the use case above, thanks.

[dmoody256]

I admit I did lose motivation to continue work on those PRs because I felt the overall developer sentiment seemed to be to get rid of SCons. I still am interested in working with Godot SCons build system if there is any desire to keep SCons build system.

[Xrayez]

Yeah, I think the current indecision in Godot is what holds back the work, both for improving SCons usage and possible Meson integration... I think major buildsystem changes are unlikely to be considered up until Godot 4.0 stable is out, but that's just my estimation. 🙂

The release policy is not really fixed in Godot so even major changes may be part of minor releases, especially when the compatibility changes mostly pertain to the editor, which is seen as the final product over everything else.

I hope SCons remains, especially when it's been used for quite a while in Godot. With things like Vulkan and lack of GLES, GDScript 2.0, GDExtension, and possibly Meson, I'm afraid I'd have to keep using Godot 3.x for quite some time. I've also seen some hobbyist Godot 3.x forks popping up because of that.

[jpakkane]

I find it essential being able to compile Godot with external custom modules, the support for which I contributed myself in godotengine#36922, which allows to build modules located from anywhere on the filesystem.

The current module implementation uses the existing config.py things and is very tied to how the current thing is set up. One of my goals is to rewrite that to use Meson builtins and once that is done, building external modules becomes simple. It should be noted, though, that Meson is quite strict about source layout so that the modules must be within a single project, not anywhere in the file system. You can still do Git submodules or whatever you want to join the two.

[jpakkane]

I wrote example code and a blog post on how external modules with Meson would work.