Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Comparing Meson with Bazel on a Raspberry Pi 3

In this experiment we compile Google's Abseil C++ libraries with Bazel and also with Meson as a simple comparison of how they behave.

Apple and orange warning!

Please do not use this text to exclaim that one of these build systems is better/more performant/etc than the other. That's not really what this is for. The two build systems build the code completely differently to different artifacts and with different targets. Consider this a more of a rough outline.

The Meson conversion

The code was converted with a simple script and then manually fixing some dependency declarations to make everything work. Due to complicated reasons there's no Git repo. Instead you can download the whole shebang as a zip file from this location. It's not against current trunk, but instead a random commit from some time ago when I started.

The original Bazel build does a bunch of complicated things with shared libraries and the like. The Meson one simply builds a static library for each of the Abseil modules. This is not particularly efficient but I just wanted to get something out without spending days replicating the build setup.

The build setup is complete enough to build all unit tests apart from ones that seem to require magic compiler flags, because they give compilation errors about missing timespec definitions.

Memory usage

When doing the actual compilation, Meson is not resident in memory. Only Ninja is, and it takes 2-5 MB of memory in total.

The Bazel master process takes roughly 90 MB when compiling. That is almost 10% of total system memory.

CPU utilization

Based on top/htop eyeballing, Ninja keeps all cores pegged almost all of the time. The time command reported CPU usage of 328%. It was necessary to manually specify -j 4 to Ninja (the default value is 6) because otherwise the system would hard freeze under load, most likely due to memory running out.

Weirdly Bazel had a really hard time keeping cores running. It was common to have 1-3 cores idle (that is, not even waiting for IO) during the build. It is not known what causes this. Perhaps a lot of time is spent doing the file copies and symlinks that Bazel needs for its hermetic builds. But even then, maximal usage of resources is one of Bazel's claimed strong points but in this particular case that does not seem to be happening. It is possible that the behaviour has been tuned to data centers with tens of cores and fast SSDs and because of that does not scale down to ARM processors with an SD card for storage.

Total compile time

Meson used 6 minutes whereas Bazel used 17 minutes. But note the text above! Do not use this as any sort of "real" perf measurement because the setups were different. That being said if you consider that Ninja gets up to 3x better CPU utilization, the numbers seem to be in the rough neighborhood as far as total CPU usage is concerned.

Ninja reports doing 190 build steps whereas Bazel reports a number on the order of 4-500. Many of these seem to deal with file copying and the like which the Meson setup does not do at all. Effort was not spent on examining what these steps do and how (or if) they could be replicated in Meson.

Which one is better/which one should I use/which subreddit should I post this to?

That's not what this post was about. Do your own tests and draw your own conclusions.

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