Newb question: how to manage debug/release build types in a single meson project in practice?

[metaleap]

Just getting into Meson via its Manual. Given that I'll want to default to debug builds (or rather, to the fastest build possible) during development but also have the option to occasionally but straightforwardly make a Release build from the same overall build-system setup and sources..

As I grok things so far, I'd have something like this:

project('myapp', 'c', default_options: ['buildtype=debug'])
executable(
    'myapp', 'main.c', dependencies: [dependency('sdl2')]
)
executable(
    'myapp_shipping',
    'main.c',
    override_options: ['buildtype=release'],
    dependencies: [dependency('sdl2')],
)

But this way, I see duplication of main.c and dependencies already, not desirable. There probably is a smoother way in Meson for this I haven't found yet?

Furthermore, to speed up build times, in "debug mode" I'd want to build (and link) lib targets as shared libs (ie dynamically linked ie at runtime/startup), and only statically link for "release mode".

Will this be very rocket-sciency to formulate? Does anyone do things similarly, what's your general "template of approach" here?

[dcbaker]

Generally Meson steers you to have two build directories configured differently, so you'd have:

project('myapp', 'c')  # debug is already the default build type

executable('myapp', 'main.c', dependencies : [dependency('sdl2')])

Then you'd configure two separate build directories in your project:

meson setup builddir/debug
ninja -C builddir/debug
meson setup builddir/release -Dbuildtype=release -Dprefer_static=true
ninja -C builddir/release

This is advantageous because you probably don't want to ship both a debug and a release build, and you don't end up compiling the same files twice when you probably are only going to test one binary.

edit: Eli's suggestion to use prefer_static is the correct one, and I've removed the original answer I had.

[eli-schwartz]

I don't really understand what you're trying to do here. :)

The default buildtype is already debug: https://mesonbuild.com/Builtin-options.html#core-options

You can build a release version by configuring a second build directory using meson setup --buildtype=release, and avoid defining the same executable twice in meson.build.

[eli-schwartz]

Furthermore, to speed up build times, in "debug mode" I'd want to build (and link) lib targets as shared libs (ie dynamically linked ie at runtime/startup), and only statically link for "release mode".

There is a core option -Dprefer_static=false, which you can configure to "true" instead and which will try to use dependencies as statically linked. It's not necessary to hardcode this in meson.build (and people building your project, if it is open source, may want to build release mode using shared libraries too, so having this as a build option has some advantages).

[metaleap]

Thanks, you two, glad to see my needs are so well (and succinctly) covered by Meson =)