[CMake] Ninja: a small build system closest in spirit to Make

[Matt Williams]

On Thursday 10 Feb 2011 14:38:55 Nicolas Desprès wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Probably some of you are already aware of this new open-source project
> coming from a Chrome developer at Google.
> 
> Its goal was to improve the build system performance of the Chrome
> project. So it is designed to be a fast replacement for make.
> 
> He speaks about it in its blog here:
> 
> http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2011/02/ninja.html
> 
> You can find the source code here:
> 
> https://github.com/martine/ninja
> 
> and the manual here:
> 
> http://martine.github.com/ninja/manual.html
> 
> As mentioned in the documentation the input file for ninja are not
> designed to be written by hand and should be generated.  So it
> perfectly fits in CMake generator approach to build system.
> 
> Maybe it worth adding a new generator for Ninja in CMake.  I don't
> know about the maturity/stability of the project, though it is still
> very young (started in last October but still maintained today
> according to the git log).  Also, if it is internally used at Google
> for the Chrome project, I think it is not going to die.
> 
> I will try to find some time on my spare time to start writing a
> generator for it.  Helps is welcome too :-)  I would like to see if it
> really increases build time of project already using CMake, such as
> boost or KDE.

I would be very interested to see this. I think we all now that in many ways 
'make' is showing its age. Without tools like CMake supporting Ninja it will 
have a hard time catching on. I don't really have to time to devote to 
developing the generator but I would be very happy to test it on a number of 
CMake projects I'm involved with.

Do we know if Ninja is supposed to be cross-platform (i.e. Windows) as well?

Regards,
Matt