Ninja Build Reviews and Details

Is Ninja Build good?

Social recommendations and mentions

• CMake Made Simple: A Reusable Template for Your First C++ Project

  On Windows, download the binaries from the cmake and Ninja websites. After that, add the executables to your PATH. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago

• 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 / over 2 years 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 / over 2 years 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• Ask HN: What outdated tech are you still using and are perfectly happy with?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 / over 2 years 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: about 3 years 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 3 years ago

• Is there any way to configure my project so I can work on it on both Windows and MacOS?

  There are also some other tools like https://ninja-build.org/ that you might prefer using instead. Source: over 3 years ago

• Just: A Command Runner

  Oh excellent, then better (and more portable!) tools are available: http://pants.build https://ninja-build.org https://buck.build and, if you hate yourself: https://bazel.build. - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago

• Classifying Python virtual environment workflows

  > I guess the quickest solution is to checksum the pyproject.toml This is the kind of stuff bazel/ninja do. https://bazel.build https://ninja-build.org. - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago

• I've Been Laid Off. What Now?

  Zig's potential is that it is pretty easy to write cross-platform code with it. Normally writing cross-platform code involves using a cross-compiler setup where you write code that targets another platform that's different than your host system. It requires using compilers that have ABIs of the target system, which is not something many have readily available. Sometimes you're often left having to do this yourself... - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago

• Chrome, 10 Years Later

  He didn't make it that obvious but the author is also the creator of Ninja [0]. One of the, if not the, fastest ways to build C/C++ software on a single machine. 0 - https://ninja-build.org/. - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago

• My RISC-V OSDev journey, so far

  Familiarity with compiling software from source and build systems. If not already familiar with an existing build system such as Make or Ninja, the best way to familiarize yourself with them is to simply build and install a bunch of software from source, such as giving Linux From Scratch (LFS) a go - by the time you manage to complete LFS, you'll certainly be able to recite configure; make; make install... - Source: dev.to / over 3 years ago

• Made a wrapper for gcc with Bash

  You're not supposed to write ninja yourself. From the ninja website:. Source: almost 4 years ago

• I tried Turborepo and I liked it

  I was just investigating whether Ninja ("where other build systems are high-level languages Ninja aims to be an assembler") could be used to build a DIY monorepo toolkit. It might be a long road, especially given the complexity of JS development these days. We don't just need an "incremental rebuild" on top of locally-modified files that produce a single artifact; we need hot reloading, multiple entry points,... Source: almost 4 years ago

• A Tutorial on Portable Makefiles

  Recovering an ancient project (K&R C !) sent me back down the "which build tool should I be using?" rabbit hole. First approximation: No one's happy with any tool, with good reason. Then I discovered Ninja. It's an assembly language for builds, advertised as a back end for higher level tools, but many people script Ninja themselves in their favorite language. Ninja is exceptionally fast, and handles parallelism... - Source: Hacker News / almost 4 years ago

• aurutils: support for the ninja build system

  Also had no knowledge of ninja before reading your post. https://ninja-build.org/. Source: over 4 years ago

• Hacktoberfest 4

  The first I worked on was ElectionGuard, which is an SDK that performs ballot encryption and verification functions for digital elections. I've been trying to build it for a few days now but had been unsuccessful so far. I started by installing GNU Make, Chocolatey, and MSYS2. I went through a lot of trial and error with CMake, including erroneously thinking my build worked when I searched for a .sln and found an... - Source: dev.to / over 4 years ago

• My note-taking process

  Ninja — build system similar to make. - Source: dev.to / over 4 years ago

• Cmake alterntives

  The build can be faster if you use Ninja instead of make. Ninja was designed for speed and to have its input files be generated by programs instead of hand-written. If a project is already just using make, simply changing the generator to Ninja cmake -G Ninja will probably result in faster builds. Source: almost 5 years ago

• Is there a statically typed functional programming language that doesn't take purity so seriously?

  * BuckleScript/ReScript works by forking the OCaml compiler and has been stuck on years-out-of-date versions of it as a result. Works well but you miss out on some nice stuff that's been done the past few years. Melange is trying to fix some of that by splitting out the compiler changes in a way that lets it keep up with recent compiler versions, plus eventually replace its odd custom Ninja-based build system... Source: about 5 years ago

• How do you build your source code?

  We use ninja - a very small and fast build system. Ninja generally needs something to generate its build files (CMake, Meson, etc.), but we just use a little Python script to generate ours. Source: about 5 years ago