Re: Equivalent of recursive make with meson/ninja?

[Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbheek chauhan gmail com>]

On 11-Feb-2017 18:32, "Sébastien Wilmet" <swilmet gnome org> wrote:

> and it will only recompile/relink the bits that have changed, and
> nothing else. It will be very very fast in most cases.

It'll also relink all the tests and rebuild the docs (GTK-Doc is very
slow).

Fwiw, it won't rebuild the docs since that is done at install time, not at compile time. It also won't relink all the tests if you specify a target (an executable, library, etc) to build. You can also rebuild a specific file by specifying the corresponding .o file, and I'm sure that can be made more convenient with a wrapper tool.

I think your use-case can even be improved by writing such a tool that will rebuild only a specific file. This would actually be faster than make even because it wouldn't relink anything in that directory unless you want it to. 

Would you like to take a shot at it? It's really simpler than it might seem. Just a matter of reading the compiler db (json file) and calling ninja with the right argument. :)

IMO this is one of the major advantages of Meson. It actually provides an API that you can use to support and even improve your custom workflows.

Cheers,

Nirbheek