[Scons-users] SCons vs Meson for Python projects

[Saša Janiška]

Hello,

I was playing with SCons in the past, but didn’t switch since setuptools
did whatever I need.

Now I do plan to do more serious work with either Cython - for both
speeding up the code and provide Python bindings for C libs - or with
Nuitka compiler along with using PyQt, rst/Sphinx to generate html/PDF
docs etc.

It seems that all these is going over the setuptools’ scope…

Afaict, CMake does some unofficial support for Cython and does support
Sphinx and PyQt, but their DSL is not the most friendly one.

Waf is simply a bit strange for my taste (I do not want to mention
autotools here), which makes the list pretty short: SCons and Meson.

Meson looks very attractive and fast with a custom DSL to define
configuration and by looking at its comparison
(https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/wiki/Simple%20comparison) it seems
that SCons’ slowness (especially for ’empty build’) is the only ’cons’
(pun intended). :-)

Jamier Allsop in his presentation
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_HhBT6xGeE&t=321s) about Cuppa
answered the question in regard to the slowness of SCons that is it
mostly FUD. Moreover, I was watching (again) Birk’s talk “Why SCons is
not slow” where he mentioned a patch due to spawn problem, but whne
looking in wiki (https://bitbucket.org/scons/scons/wiki/Roadmap) there
is still “Integrating stubprocess.py wrapper for speedup” task with
“wip” status aiming at 2.5 release, so just wonder if it’s still wip or
it is done?

(My projects will probably not grow up to >10k files, but still wonder
about that.)

So, is there anyone familiar with both build systems and/or can give some
insight whether you consider SCons suitable as build system for
Python-based projects?


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
Never was there a time when I did not exist,
nor you, nor all these kings; nor in the future
shall any of us cease to be.