Does meson has a general function to print out any type variables's value?

Question

I've encountered some projects which uses meson to organize their building system. But when I want to debug their building system, I found it's difficult. The most important task is observing the building system's variable during its running. I could use message() function to show the variables of types, e.g.

integer
string
lists (of string/integer/lists)

But if the variable is dictionary type, the message() will refuse to display any information in the variable.

Does meson have a general function to display any type's variable just like python's print() function? If not, do we have any solution to do this?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It is probably hard for the maintainers of meson to print out every object that is available in the meson.build script.

deps = []

# add some dependencies to the deps list or obtain the deps elsewhere

message('the depencies are: ')
foreach dep : deps
    message(' - ', dep.name())
endforeach

For me this results in:

Message: the depencies are: 
Message:  -  glib-2.0
Message:  -  gobject-2.0
Message:  -  gtk4
Message:  -  epoxy

You can't print/message a dependency, but you can print the name of the dependency :-)

Answer 2

You can print any object with:

message('@0@'.format(f))

Source: https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/issues/9575#issuecomment-969053569