frankly I would ditch Visual Studio support for msys2/ttc since you can use any lightweight C/C++ IDE with it and visual studio is very bloated where as Msys2 is not as bloated since it's just the compiler

Visual Studio is an IDE, but MSVC is the compiler that comes bundled inside it. Using the latter is probably more compelling than the former.

In general, I would recommend meson, but visual studio support (if that's a hard requirement?) is less mature than CMake.

The Visual Studio + MSVC support in Meson may not be as high quality as the ninja + MSVC support, but those sorts of issues are most likely only going to show up in projects that venture into things a lot more complicated than just C/C++. Anyway, the solution is of course to use ninja anyway -- it will always be much, much faster. :D

I agree, but let me clarify that by "visual studio" I mean visual studio project files built with msbuild.exe, not the IDE. I figure mingw+ninja should be enough on Windows but sometimes Windows development leads to... strange dependencies.

The existing build system works great with a linux-based workflow (MSVC is gross), but CMake is always a plus.

well if you go with msys2 mainly you can have cmake, and meson. then considering that the base install of msys2 with the proper libs and compiler is around 2GB or less not sure on that where as VS just by itself is 10GB+ not including the other libs and compiler. since people who want to use this will have to compile it for obvious reasons using a lightweight option like msys2 for windows is an excellent option just food for thought

We will not ditch VS because VS is what I use for development.

@snesrev is this workflow acceptable to you? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/build/cmake-projects-in-visual-studio?view=msvc-170

If so, I can make a PR that ports the build system to cmake.

@LaserEyess yes it looks ok