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

• muon analyze - a static analyzer for meson.build files. demo
• muon fmt - a meson.build code formatter
• An interactive stepping debugger with the dbg() function.
• A built-in cross platform ninja implementation
• fast

muon is close to feature-complete with the core of meson for c and c++.

See the status page for more detailed information.

Things missing include:

• cross-compilation support
• build optimizations like pch and unity
• some b_ options
• dependencies with a custom configuration tool
• many modules

Other differences from meson are described in doc/differences.md

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

Additionally, muon is not fully supported on all platforms yet. The current status may be viewed on muon's ci dashboard. Platforms with some or all tests disabled are currently WIP and platforms not tested in CI have unknown status. In general, posix systems should work fine.

Essential:

• A c99 compatible toolchain

For pkgconf support:

• libpkgconf
• pkgconf or pkg-config

For [wrap-file] support:

• libcurl
• libarchive

To build documentation:

• scdoc for muon.1 and meson.build.5
• python3 and py3-yaml for meson-reference.3

To run most project tests:

• python3

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.

Stage 2:

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

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

muon is licensed under the GPL version 3 (see LICENSE). Tests under tests/project were copied from the meson project tests and are licensed under Apache 2.0.

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.