[page_fault]

A large chunk of meson functionality is supported by muon, which is a pure C implementation with no dependencies. I tested it for fun with several projects and it was indistinguishable from "proper" meson. Haven't tried with anything large like qemu or systemd, though.

https://muon.build

[endgame]

I tried to use muon once and immediately discovered that it rejects passing a dict to the project() function, does not support cross-compilation, and a few other things I consider important. I hope it continues to close the gap.

But also, I still don't have an answer to "I want to build with -fvisibility=hidden and also have unit tests" that isn't "libtool".

[mid-kid]

Last I checked meson supports unit testing shared libraries just fine, as well as building both static and shared libraries "both_libraries()". This integrates fine with testing, though it modifies the binaries' rpath for library search instead of wrapping them in a script like libtool does.