Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Ninja Build VS SCons

Compare Ninja Build VS SCons and see what are their differences

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Ninja Build logo Ninja Build

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

SCons logo SCons

SCons is an Open Source software construction tool—that is, a next-generation build tool.
  • Ninja Build Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-14
  • SCons Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-21

Ninja Build videos

FORTNITE STW: HERE IS THE BEST NINJA BUILD (AFTER MONTHS OF TESTING)

SCons videos

Review Scons Bañados Dia %

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Ninja Build and SCons)
Front End Package Manager
JavaScript Package Manager
JS Build Tools
53 53%
47% 47
Continuous Integration
48 48%
52% 52

User comments

Share your experience with using Ninja Build and SCons. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Ninja Build might be a bit more popular than SCons. We know about 22 links to it since March 2021 and only 15 links to SCons. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Ninja Build mentions (22)

  • TypeScript's Successor is Waiting, and You'll Never Want to Turn Back
    Under the hood, Rescript uses a build system called Ninja. Ninja is similar to Make, but cross-platform and more minimal/performant. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Using Make – writing less Makefile
    Ninja was super easy to pick up even after using make for some time (10+ years). GN is just a ninja generator that is optional. https://gn.googlesource.com/gn/+/main/docs/quick_start.md https://ninja-build.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • Ask HN: What outdated tech are you still using and are perfectly happy with?
    Really? I thought most new projects were switching to ninja[^1] and have never used it. [^1]: https://ninja-build.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • What was used to build C++ programs before Cmake?
    Ninja showed real promise for a while, but then CMake grew up and people stopped seeing a reason to leave it behind. Source: 11 months ago
  • Building and Running Pidgin and Finch 3
    Now that you have your build system all generated you can go ahead and build everything. By default Meson will use Ninja as the build tool. Ninja is similar to Make but much much faster. You can also generate additional build systems but that's outside of the scope of this post. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
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SCons mentions (15)

  • Tired of Makefiles
    Has anyone tried SCONS? Came across someone using it in a place where I worked earlier. Python-based make-like tool. https://scons.org/. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • Show HN: Jeeves – A Pythonic Alternative to GNU Make
    The most comprehensive make alternative in python I've seen is Scons (https://scons.org/) It would be worth to see how they tackles some of the challenges you're looking into. Blurb from the website: SCons is an Open Source software construction tool. Think of SCons as an improved, cross-platform substitute for the classic Make utility with integrated functionality similar to autoconf/automake and compiler caches... - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
  • Taskfile: A Modern Alternative to Makefile
    Https://scons.org/ It has cache facility to speed up re-builds. - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago
  • What was used to build C++ programs before Cmake?
    SCons never got popular enough to escape the niches it grew up in. Source: 11 months ago
  • Is it possible to dynamically introduce nodes inside the project
    I literally do almost this exact thing with the game im working on. Situation is: im the programmer, working with an artist who cant code (and im not going to make them edit json on an ipad lmao) so I have a google drive spreadsheet where they put metadata for the items they make. I have a script that uses rclone to copy this down as a csv, along with the image assets. Then I wrote a python extension for scons... Source: about 1 year ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Ninja Build and SCons, you can also consider the following products

Meson - Meson is an open source build system meant to be both extremely fast, and, even more importantly...

GNU Make - GNU Make is a tool which controls the generation of executables and other non-source files of a program from the program's source files.

CMake - CMake is an open-source, cross-platform family of tools designed to build, test and package software.

Apache Maven - Apache Maven is a project comprehension and management software tool.

SBT - SBT is a build tool for Scala, like Ant or Maven but with hieroglyphics.

npm - npm is a package manager for Node.