How to include libclang as a dependency using meson?

Question

I am trying to use libclang for some source parsing on linux. I have libclang-dev installed and it appears under the list of packages for apt on my system.

However when i try to add it as a dependency through any of:

dependency('clang') dependency('libclang') dependency('libclang-dev') dependency('libclang-cpp-dev')

In all cases I get

Run-time dependency clang found: NO (tried pkgconfig and cmake)

Despite it no being able to find it in my system I thought I could just compile it from source. To that effect I tried this:

opt_var = cmake.subproject_options()
opt_var.append_link_args('-fPIC')
sub_proj = cmake.subproject('clang', options : opt_var)
clang = sub_proj.dependency('clang')

Which gives :

../subprojects/clang/meson.build:0:0: ERROR: Can't link non-PIC static library 'clangBasic' into shared library 'clang_cpp'. Use the 'pic' option to static_library to build with PIC.

I tested compilation of clang outside of meson (i.e. i made a build directory and did cmake .. && make) and it works so this is a problem with how meson is calling cmake, not with the library.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I found a temporary solution but I hate it because it's too system specific, you can add the following:

cpp = meson.get_compiler('cpp')

includes = include_directories(['/usr/lib/llvm-13/include/'])
libclang_lib = cpp.find_library('clang', dirs:'/usr/lib/llvm-13/lib', header_include_directories: includes)

libclang = declare_dependency(dependencies:libclang_lib, include_directories:includes)

To your meson script. Then use libclang as a dependency.

I am still interested in an answer that is more general/less OS specific.