[ihnorton]

This is interesting. It will certainly give a boost to Meson, which is in part a better CMake (the compilation model is very similar). It probably makes a lot of sense for SciPy given the alternatives, but from an ecosystem perspective it's not clear whether it is better enough to justify the churn. For example, caching seems like a secondary concern and outsourced to Linux-specific technologies. This is unfortunate given the implications of build time for individual and team (CI) productivity, as well as the environmental considerations of redundant compilation at scale.

I haven't followed Meson closely in about 3 years, but I also got the sense that Windows support sometimes lagged. If that's true, it's going to be a tough sell for the many large C++ projects who adopted CMake almost exclusively due to its support for Windows and Visual Studio.