Ninja is a small
build system developed by Evan Martin, a
Google employee. Ninja has a focus on speed and it differs from other build systems in two major respects: it is designed to have its input files generated by a higher-level build system, and it is designed to run builds as fast as possible.
Build system
In essence, Ninja is meant to replace
Make, which is slow when performing incremental (or no-op) builds. This can considerably slow down developers working on large projects, such as
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS ...
which compiles 40,000 input files into a single executable. In fact, Google Chrome is a main user and motivation for Ninja. It's also used to build Android (via Makefile translation by ''Kati''), and is used by most developers working on
LLVM.
In contrast to
Make, Ninja lacks features such as string manipulation, as Ninja build files are not meant to be written by hand. Instead, a "build generator" should be used to generate Ninja build files.
Gyp,
CMake,
Meson, and gn are popular build management software tools which support creating build files for Ninja.
Example
rule cc
command = gcc -c -o $out $in
description = CC $out
rule link
command = gcc -o $out $in
description = LINK $out
build source1.o: cc source1.c
build source2.o: cc source2.c
build myprogram: link source1.o source2.o
References
External links
Official Website* {{GitHub, ninja-build/ninja
Build automation
Free and open-source software