I watched the Linux.conf.au 2015 video to get a more detailed overview of meson.  I think the most interesting feature is that it at least partially tries to address the problem of building library dependencies, although I don&#x27;t get the impression that was an emphasis.<p>In particular, the tup build system didn&#x27;t get mentioned at all, which I find surprising, since IMHO it has broken new ground in build speed, correctness, and ergonomics.  I think it hasn&#x27;t gone viral because it doesn&#x27;t try to solve most of the language specific problems people are starting to expect build systems to solve. It also doesn&#x27;t have a very good story for the build specification language, IMHO.<p>I think a bigger issue in build systems is that the open source ecosystem does NOT have a tree structure; you have a big rats nest of dependencies on specific versions because everything is constantly changing.  I think we need something like nix, but that is fully distributed, and perhaps piggybacking on git databases (and ssh trust networks) to distribute binary dependencies along with the source.