Is Ninja a compiler?

 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.

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]

Contents

• 1Example
• 2See also
• 3References
• 4External links

Example[edit]

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

See also[edit]

• GYP (software)
• Meson (software)
• CMake

References[edit]

1. ^ Martin, Evan. "Google Groups: ninja-build". Retrieved 18 June 2017.
2. ^ "Releases - ninja-build/ninja". Retrieved 8 December 2020.
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.

External links[edit]

• Official Website
• ninja on GitHub