Switch to Meson build system?

[dnicolodi]

To be able to use RE/flex as a Meson subproject, I wrote a Meson build recipe for it. It is currently hosted on WrapDB https://github.com/mesonbuild/wrapdb/tree/master/subprojects/packagefiles/reflex

Is there any interest in incorporating it in the official repository, alongside the other build definitions or replacing them? I see that RE/flex already maintains three build recipes: autotools, manual makefiles, and the visual studio solution. Meson would be a way to unify the Unix and Windows builds. I believe the manual makefiles are kept because autotools is a bit of an heavy dependencies on some platforms. Meson on the other hand is easily installed on all platforms, thus switching to Meson would remove the need to maintain these makefiles.

The linked Meson build definition, implements all the checks and options of the autotools build recipe, except for building tests and examples (which could be easily added) and (to me, at least) looks much simpler.

Comments?

[genivia-inc]

Thank you for sharing your suggestion. I think it would be nice and helpful to users to include a Meson build recipe with RE/flex.

Building with a recipe from source should include a SSE2/AVX2/NEON/AArch64 check if users want to accelerate searching the input with the regex engine (but SIMD has no to little effect when tokenizing input).

[dnicolodi]

Building with a recipe from source should include a SSE2/AVX2/NEON/AArch64 check if users want to accelerate searching the input with the regex engine (but SIMD has no to little effect when tokenizing input).

This is already done in the Meson build recipe I linked to. It works on Linux and macOS from local testing and it has been verified in GitHub Actions CI infrastructure on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

I think it would be nice and helpful to users to include a Meson build recipe with RE/flex.

I am not a big fan of alternative build recipes as it duplicates maintenance costs with the risk of one falling behind the others. Unless RE/flex targets platforms that are still not well supported by Meson, I would advocate to switch to it. One immediate benefit would be fixing #142