short-description: Auto-detection of features like ccache and code coverage ...
Meson is designed for high productivity. It tries to do as many things automatically as it possibly can.
Ccache
Ccache is a cache system designed to make compiling faster. When you run Meson for the first time for a given project, it checks if Ccache is installed. If it is, Meson will use it automatically.
If you do not wish to use Ccache for some reason, just specify your compiler with environment variables CC and/or CXX when first running Meson (remember that once specified the compiler cannot be changed). Meson will then use the specified compiler without Ccache.
Coverage
When doing a code coverage build, Meson will check for existence of the binaries gcovr, lcov and genhtml. If version 3.3 or higher of the first is found, targets called coverage-text, coverage-xml and coverage-html are generated. If version 4.2 or higher of the first is found, targets coverage-text, coverage-xml, coverage-sonarqube and coverage-html are generated. Alternatively, if the latter two are found, only the target coverage-html is generated. Coverage reports can then be produced simply by calling e.g. meson compile coverage-xml. As a convenience, a high-level coverage target is also generated which will produce all 3 coverage report types, if possible.
Note that generating any of the coverage reports described above requires the tests (i.e. meson test) to finish running so the information about the functions that are called in the tests can be gathered for the report.