Recently Herb Sutter published cppfront, which is an attempt to create C++ a new syntax to fix many issues that can't be changed in existing C++ because of backwards compatibility. Like with the original cfront compiler, cppfront works by parsing the "new syntax" C++ and transpiling it to "classic" C++, which is then compiled in the usual way. These kinds of source generators are fairly common (it is basically how Protobuf et al work) so let's look at how to add support for this in Meson. We are also going to download and build the cppfront compiler transparently.
Building the compiler
The first thing we need to do is to add Meson build definitions for cppfront. It's basically this one file:
cppfront = executable('cppfront', 'source/cppfront.cpp',
override_options: ['optimization=2'])
meson.override_find_program('cppfront', cppfront)
cpp2_dep = declare_dependency(include_directories: 'include')
The compiler itself is in a single source file so building it is simple. The only thing to note is that we override settings so it is always built with optimizations enabled. This is acceptable for this particular case because the end result is not used for development, only consumption. The more important bits for integration purposes are the last two lines where we define that from now on whenever someone does a find_program('cppfront') Meson does not do a system lookup for the binary but instead returns the just-built executable object instead. Code generated by cppfront requires a small amount of helper functionality, which is provided as a header-only library. The last line defines a dependency object that carries this information (basically just the include directory).
Building the program
The actual program is just a helloworld. The Meson definition needed to build it is this:
That's a bit more code but still fairly straightforward. First we get the cppfront program and the corresponding dependency object. Then we create a generator that translates cpp2 files to cpp files, give it some input and compile the result.
Gluing it all together
Each one of these is its own isolated repo (available here and here respectively). The simple thing would have been to put both of these in the same repository but that is very inconvenient. Instead we want to write the compiler setup once and use it from any other project. Thus we need some way of telling our app repository where to get the compiler. This is achieved with a wrap file:
directory=cppfront
url=https://github.com/jpakkane/cppfront
revision=main
[provide]
cpp2 = cpp2_dep
program_names = cppfront
Placing this in the consuming project's subprojects directory is all it takes. When you start the build and try to look up either the dependency or the executable name, Meson will see that they are provided by the referenced repo and will clone, configure and build it automatically:
As you can tell from the logs, Meson first tries to find the dependencies from the system and only after it fails does it try to download them from the net. (This behaviour can be altered.) Now the code can be built and the end result run:
The code has only been tested with GCC but in theory it should work with Clang and VS too.
I wish I could read more about people trying cpp2 / cppfront. Currently, it es a chicken egg problem. Users are waiting for wide-spread use, tooling is waiting for wide-spread use, and we are all stuck with the shortcomings of C++.
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