Advanced dependency management and building Python wheels with Meson

One of the most complex pieces of developing C and C++ programs (and most other languages) is dependency management. When developing A4PDF I have used Ubuntu's default distro dependencies. This is very convenient because you typically don't need to fiddle with getting them built and they are battle tested and almost always work.

Unfortunately you can't use those in most dev environments, especially Windows. So let's see how much work it takes to build the whole thing on Windows using only Visual Studio and to bundle the whole thing into a Python wheel so it can be installed and distributed. I would have wanted to also put it in Pypi but currently there is a lockdown caused by spammers so no go on that front.

Seems like a lot of effort? Let's start by listing all the dependencies:

• fmt
• Freetype
• LibTIFF
• LibPNG
• LibJPEG (turbo)
• LittleCMS2
• Zlib

These are all available via WrapDB, so each one can be installed by executing a command like the following:

meson wrap install fmt

With that done Meson will automatically download and compile the dependencies from source. No changes need to be done in the main project's meson.build files. Linux builds will keep using system deps as if nothing happened.

Next we need to build a Python extension package. This is different from a Python extension module, as the project uses ctypes for Python <-> C interop. Fortunately thanks to the contributors of Meson-Python this comes down to writing an 18 line toml file. Everything else is automatically handled for you. Installing the package is then a question of running this command:

pip install .

After a minute or two of compilation the module is installed. Here is a screenshot of the built libraries in the system Python's site-packages.

Now we can open a fresh terminal and start using the module.

Random things of note

• Everything here uses only Meson. There are no external dependency managers, unix userland emulators or special terminals that you have to use.
• In theory this could work on macOS too, but the code is implemented in C++23 and Apple's toolchain is too old to support it.
• The build definitions for A4PDF take only 155 lines (most of which is source and program name listings).
• If, for whatever reason, you can't use WrapDB, you can host your own.