Converting Godot game engine to Meson, how you can help

There has long been interest in switching the Godot game engine from its current SCons build system to Meson. The actual details are here, but as a quick summary:

• The original port was written by community members.
• It got stale, so I have been keeping it rebased against current master
• The original plan was to review and possibly merge it immediately after the 4.0 alpha release.

Unfortunately the people who should do the review are currently very busy with other things and can't spend much time on this. It would be important to get the change in before the 4.0 release as changing build systems mid-release is apparently a difficult task.

How can you participate?

As the actual devs are busy, what we can do is try to make things as easy for them as possible. In other words the port needs review and testing. The simplest way is to help is to check out the code from the meson branch of this repo, compiling it and running it. Then report your success (or failure) in this Github discussion thread. I will keep rebasing the branch against upstream master at regular intervals.

Note that if you encounter bugs, please do not file them against the upstream project unless you have verified that they also occur with a regular SCons build.

Currently it compiles and runs for me on Linux, Windows and macOS, but the more people can verify it the better.

It would be especially useful if people could test it on Android. FWICT the original uses Android Studio for the Java bits and somehow uses SCons to build a shared library that is used. The Meson build does build the shared lib, but it has not been tested. If someone with Android dev experience could set up and test the whole pipeline it would be great.

The same goes for iOS, though I know even less how it should be set up as I have not really done iOS development. It should build for iOS (there is a cross file in the repo) but FWICT it has never been tested beyond that.

The eventual goal

The aim is to make the Meson port as polished and tested as possible so that once upstream makes their final decision it should be as easy as possible for them (regardless of what they eventually end up choosing). The more people have tried it, the more confidence there is that the port can actually do all the things that are needed.