A build file (default name: build.ninja) provides a list of rules — short names for longer commands, like how to run the compiler — along with a list of build statements saying how to build files using the rules — which rule to apply to which inputs to produce which outputs.

May 11, 2024 · Ninja build files are human-readable but not especially convenient to write by hand. (See the generated build file used to build Ninja itself .) These constrained build files allow Ninja to evaluate incremental builds quickly.

Ninja is a 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 is a small build system with a focus on speed. https://ninja-build.org/ See the manual or doc/manual.asciidoc included in the distribution for background and more details. Binaries for Linux, Mac and Windows are available on GitHub. Run ./ninja -h for Ninja help.

In summary, if you need to ensure security, you can download it from the ninja GitHub release page; if you want convenience, you can use various community-maintained installation methods. The build configuration file for ninja is generally called build.ninja.

Jan 22, 2025 · When you execute ninja, by default, it reads the settings from a file called build.ninja in the current directory. To specify a file name when running, use the option ninja -f filepath . Let's look at how to write the configuration file.

Nov 4, 2016 · For a much larger project (10,000 programs, 100,000 C files and 100,000 header files) there is a significant difference in a no-op build: 73s for Make versus 1.5s for Ninja. Make spends 98% of that time processing the 100,000 compiler-generated “.d ” files that are used for tracking implicit dependencies on header files.

Ninja achieves its incredible speed by reducing a key performance factor in modern build systems—parsing user-created control files. Other compilation systems process control files (i.e. Makefiles in GNU Make) that direct the builder to process commands and …

Jan 12, 2023 · If you’re already using Make, Meson, or CMake to generate build files and using Make to build them, Ninja is a plug-and-play replacement that will, at worst, keep the performance the same or, at best, improve it in an exponential manner in case of incremental builds.

May 3, 2024 · This page lists generators that can produce ninja files. Some of them are generally usable; some are one-off scripts specific to a given project. Bang is a Ninja file generator written and scripted in LuaX.