Ninja

Ninja is an alternative to Make. I hesitate to call it a replacement, but it is a faster alternative. It achieves its high performance by removing some of the features that Make offers, such as string manipulation, loops, and pattern matching.

Ninja has less overhead by removing these features, and because of that, it is not wise to write Ninja build scripts from scratch.

Writing Ninja scripts can be compared to writing shell scripts, the downsides of which we explained in the previous section. That's why it is recommended to use it together with a build script generator tool like CMake.

In this section, we show how Ninja can be used when Ninja build scripts are generated by CMake. Therefore, in this section, we won't go through the syntax of Ninja, as we did for Makefiles. That's because we are not going to write them ourselves; instead, we are going to ask CMake to generate them for us.

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