Ninja (build system)

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.

Ninja
Ninja being used to compile GStreamer
Developer(s)Evan Martin
Initial release2012 (2012)[1]
Stable release
1.10.0[2] / January 28, 2020 (2020-01-28)
Repository
Written inC++, Python
Operating systemLinux, macOS, Windows
TypeSoftware development tools
LicenseApache License 2.0[3]
Websiteninja-build.org/ 

In essence, Ninja is meant to replace Make, which is slow when performing incremental (or no-op) builds.[4] This can considerably slow down developers working on large projects, such as Google Chrome which compiles 40,000 input files into a single executable. In fact, Google Chrome is a main user and motivation for Ninja.[5] It's also used to build Android,[6] and is used by most developers working on LLVM.[7]

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[8] are popular build management software tools which support creating build files for Ninja.[9]

See also

References
  1. Martin, Evan. "Google Groups: ninja-build". Retrieved 18 June 2017.
  2. "Releases - ninja-build/ninja". Retrieved 26 May 2020.
  3. "COPYING". Github. Retrieved 5 September 2019.
  4. Röthlisberger, David. "The Ninja build tool". LWN. Retrieved 18 June 2017.
  5. "Ninja". The Performance Of Open Source Applications. Retrieved 18 June 2017.
  6. "aosp mailing list".
  7. "LLVM documentation".
  8. "gn - Git at Google".
  9. Kitware. "cmake Documentation". Retrieved 18 June 2017.
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