Designing a modern build system and dependency manager, how hard can it be?

The Meson build system is a modern build system with its own package manager. It supports many programming languages and it is most used for C and C++ projects. While writing a package manager might seem like a simple task, it turns out to be quite complicated. This is especially true when compiling low level system libraries This talk presents many of the various reasons that make designing a build system for C and C++ difficult, ranging from the need to support 20+ different compilers to the intricacies of making projects written by different people work together seamlessly on platforms ranging from Windows to Linux distros to bare metal. Time permitting there will be live demos of building a complex project on multiple platforms while conforming to the system requirements of each.