That's an availability bias. While cmake is common in commercial settings, I haven't seen autoconf used outside of open source. I've seen scons and meson both used as well at various companies.
Meson seems to be spreading pretty rapidly. After I was introduced to it a few years ago for work, I started using it as my default build system for C++ elsewhere and more C++ devs I know have started using it. I've seen it replace CMake and make at large companies for C++.
Meson is much easier to use and configure for C++, being quite obviously designed specifically with C++ builds in mind. It automagically does the right thing for setting up most C++ build environments by default with virtually no config or quirks you need to learn. It is built on top of Ninja, and generally very fast and efficient. The only real knock against it is that the documentation isn't as good as could be, and it is evolving quickly, but the fact that it often "just works" doing the obvious thing makes it less of an issue. In my experience, setting up a cmake environment has a significantly steeper learning curve and is more work.
The tradeoff is that Meson takes a fairly rigorous "one correct way" approach to how you organize your builds. It doesn't prevent you from doing anything functional but what it forces you to do is very sensible, minimizes the potential for issues in diverse environments, and reduces the degrees of freedom Meson has to sort out. A prohibition on unfettered creativity, advisable or not, in how you manage your builds has turned out to be a blessing in my experience because it codifies what are very arguably best practices in code and then makes it easy to implement them.
I'm fairly agnostic on build systems -- I've probably used a dozen -- but Meson, even in its relatively youthful state, is the best C++ build system I've used so far in terms of getting things done quickly in a maintainable way that is easy to use for average programmers.
How would you evaluate Meson as a build system for C projects? I _think_ C and C++ build process is very similar, but I only work professionally with C, so maybe there are some quirks to C++ I am not aware of.
Basically, I wonder if you would recommend Meson as a build system for a mostly C project with maybe some C++ parts and some extra external tools ran on top.
I agree with your presumption that it almost certainly should work well but I haven't actually used it for a C project. Offhand, I can't think of anything that I would expect to break.
Has anyone done a comparison to show what the advantages and disadvantages are of each build system? Seems to me that most people pick one, and they stick with it without knowing much about the other two. In the case of automake, I didn't like it at all, and it felt more like it was geared towards open source projects that need cross compilation. For an internal large project, which is mostly what I work on, I'm curious to know what the advantages and disadvantages are of cmake versus Meson.
