Here's a post about what I did: http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2011/02/ninja.h...

Personally, this meant the error messages I got were helpful enough that my first meson-built project was working after a half-hour of deciding to port it over despite using several system libraries and doing compile-time code generation.

Meson's language is not Turing-complete, so it's easy to analyze for errors. Unlike CMake and autotools, Meson's language looks like a real (pythonish) programming language, and it isn't string-oriented; dances of escaping, substitution, and unescaping are uncommon.

Compared to autotools or hand-rolled Makefiles, CMake is a step in the right direction; meson is a leap.

CMake tries hard to to do better, but then introduces its own layers of craziness. So it's fine as long as I am not doing anything unusual, but as soon as I need to understand what is going on, I find a dizzying array of barely working moving parts beneath me.

I think a lot of people don't estimate correctly just how huge Chrome is.

OS are much larger than kernel, I'd guess all the driver code exceeds the actual kernel.

People always think they code base is large, but having built most of the Call of Duties and many Unreal games, all the OS code I've worked on is trivial in size comparison. There is probably something bigger, but games seem bigger than many major apps in my experience.

So, lots of work has been done to deal with the build times. And probably not a lot of low hanging fruit to be found. But, still more work is being done. Support is being added for 'jumbo' builds (aka unity builds, where multiple translation units are #included into one) which is helping a bit with compile and link times.

EDIT: I'm sure lots of work has been done, not trying to degrade that. Just sharing my experience on my projects, never worked with Chrome.