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google
kati
Rust2015–2024
google / kati

kati

An experimental GNU make clone

7Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

An experimental GNU make clone

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year7 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-07-08 12:57:06 UTC to 2024-11-29 15:03:18 UTC.

01232015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

7 sources
This is hilarious to me: Android, which uses it for some large component of the system that I've never quite understood Ninja is really a huge part of AOSP, the build system initially used makefiles. Things got complex really fast with a custom declarative build system (soong) and a failed/aborted migration to bazel. Google developed kati (https://github.com/google/kati) which converts Makefiles to ninja build files (or should I say file), which really is huge: λ wc -l out/build-qssi.ninja 3035442 out/build-qssi.ninja Going from makefiles/soong to ninja is painful, it takes several minutes even in a modern machine but it simply flies once ninja picks it up.
In The success and failure of Ninja (2020)
Text for those who can't/won't log in for it: AOSP master platform builds now build with ninja instead of GNU make. The build/core makefiles and Android.mk files are read by kati (https://github.com/google/kati/blob/master/README.md), which will interpret them and write out a $OUT_DIR/build_$(TARGET_PRODUCT).ninja file, and then the execution of the build rules will be handled by ninja (https://martine.github.io/ninja/). Building with kati and ninja provides some immediate benefits: 1. Faster startup time for new builds. Running kati and then ninja results in builds starting about 25% faster than GNU make. 2. Much faster incremental builds. kati caches the mtimes of files and directories it read, what environment variables it used, etc., and only re-reads all the makefiles if something has changed. Th
Read the rest
is includes globs like $(call all-files-under). Incremental builds with a warm disk cache will start within 5 seconds. 3. Better build command output. Ninja buffers the output of each command and prints it without mixing output from multiple commands, meaning error messages will be printed as a group after a build failure, and not mixed with other concurrent build output. Ninja also prints a configurable status line that defaults to printing the percentage of build commands that have been run, the number that have been run, and the number that need to run, giving a reasonable approximation of the progress through the build. 4. Incremental builds should be more reliable. Ninja considers outputs whose command line has changed to be dirty, which will catch changes to global cflags, etc. and rebuild anything that has changed. The use of ninja should be transparent, it is wrapped by the top level Makefile, so all make-based commands should continue to work. These changes are a precursor to a much larger change that will replace all the Android.mk files with data files using a format that provides much better error checking, even faster builds, and 100% reliable incremental builds.
In Android now builds with Ninja instead of Make

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