Compiling with Meson

Meson is a build system mainly focused on building compiled languages such as C and C++. The meson-python package allows it to work as a build backend to build Python wheels.

Some relevant links to official and unofficial documentation that may be worth reading are:

• The meson-python docs which describe how to use Meson as a build backend.

• The section on their built-in Cython support provides examples of how to build a Cython module.

• A complete simple example.

You need two files (plus your Cython source). First is pyproject.toml which specifies the build backend and dependencies, and contains the your project-level metadata:

[build-system]
build-backend = 'mesonpy'
requires = ['meson-python', 'cython']

[project]
name = 'example'
version = '1.0.0'

Secondly you need a meson.build, which describes how your module will be built:

project('my project', 'cython', 'c')

py = import('python').find_installation(pure: false)

py.extension_module(
   'foo',
   'foo.pyx',
   install: true
)

Additional Cython arguments can be passed to py.extension_module e.g.:

cython_args : ['-Xboundscheck=False'],

(these are essentially command-line arguments to the cython executable). Arguments to the C compiler are passed as:

c_args: ['-DCYTHON_USE_TYPE_SPECS=1'],

To use C++ as an intermediate language instead of C, change the "c" in the project line at the start of the file to "cpp".

The Numpy documentation covers details of how to use Meson to link Cython modules that do cimport numpy with Numpy.