[CMake] Ninja: a small build system closest in spirit to Make
Matt Williams
lists at milliams.com
Fri Feb 11 09:17:36 EST 2011
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
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