Ninja (build system)

Ninja
Developer(s) Evan Martin
Initial release 2012 (2012)[1]
Stable release
1.8.2[2] / September 13, 2017 (2017-09-13)
Written in C++, Python
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Software development tools
License Apache License 2.0

Ninja is a small build system with a focus on speed. 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.

In essence, Ninja is meant to replace Make, which is slow when performing incremental (or no-op) builds.[3] This can considerably slow down developers working on large projects, such as Google Chrome which compiles 30,000 input files into a single executable. In fact, Google Chrome is a main user and motivation for Ninja.[4] It's also used to build Android,[5] and is used by most developers working on LLVM.[6]

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. CMake and Meson are popular build management software tools which support creating build files for Ninja.[7]

Example

cflags = -Wall

rule cc
  command = gcc $cflags -c $in -o $out

build foo.o: cc foo.c

References

  1. ↑ Martin, Evan. "Google Groups: ninja-build". Retrieved 18 June 2017.
  2. ↑ "Releases - ninja-build/ninja". Retrieved 19 Sep 2017.
  3. ↑ Röthlisberger, David. "The Ninja build tool". LWN. Retrieved 18 June 2017.
  4. ↑ "Ninja". The Performance Of Open Source Applications. Retrieved 18 June 2017.
  5. ↑ "aosp mailing list".
  6. ↑ "LLVM documentation".
  7. ↑ Kitware. "cmake Documentation". Retrieved 18 June 2017.
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