Ninja (build system)

Ninja is a small build system developed by Evan Martin,[4] 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.

Ninja
Developer(s)Evan Martin
Initial release2012 (2012)[1]
Stable release
1.11.0[2] / May 15, 2022 (2022-05-15)
Repository
Written inC++, Python
Operating systemLinux, macOS, Windows
TypeSoftware development tools
LicenseApache License 2.0[3]
Websiteninja-build.org Edit this on Wikidata

Build system

In essence, Ninja is meant to replace Make, which is slow when performing incremental (or no-op) builds.[5] 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.[6] It's also used to build Android (via Makefile translation by Kati),[7] and is used by most developers working on LLVM.[8]

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[9] are popular build management software tools which support creating build files for Ninja.[10]

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
  1. Martin, Evan. "Google Groups: ninja-build". Retrieved 18 June 2017.
  2. "Releases - ninja-build/ninja". GitHub. Retrieved 20 June 2022.
  3. "COPYING". Github. Retrieved 5 September 2019.
  4. "Google man open sources Chrome build system".
  5. Röthlisberger, David. "The Ninja build tool". LWN. Retrieved 18 June 2017.
  6. "Ninja". The Performance Of Open Source Applications. Retrieved 18 June 2017.
  7. "aosp mailing list".
  8. "LLVM documentation".
  9. "gn - Git at Google".
  10. Kitware. "cmake Documentation". Retrieved 18 June 2017.
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