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ninja-build
ninja
C++2011–2026
ninja-build / ninja

ninja

a small build system with a focus on speed

Developer Tools
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
30Distinct people
43Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
13.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

a small build system with a focus on speed

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

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, 3:56:07 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 year43 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2011-02-06 22:21:13 UTC to 2026-08-05 19:02:37 UTC.

02462011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20112012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 2 submissions, 5 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

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
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC725

What Hacker News says

43 sources
wahern·Jun 20, 2025
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this limitation wrt Makefiles is entirely a choice by CMake, or at least a lack of volunteers for adding support to the Makefile generator. Ninja itself doesn't have any support for C++ modules (see https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/issues/2457). In fact, Ninja has fewer features in that regard than plain Make as Ninja requires all dependencies to be statically defined.
In Learn Makefiles
emmanueloga_·Nov 29, 2024
Short answer: write a ninja configuration generator instead. > ... Where other build systems are high-level languages, Ninja aims to be an assembler. > ... Ninja is intended to be used with a separate program generating its input files. > ... Ninja is pretty easy to implement for the fun 20% of it and the remaining 80% is "just" some fiddly details. There are many ninja generators out there already [1] but writing a simple, custom one shouldn't be too hard [2] and could make sense for some projects. BTW, ninja is great but I wish the configuration file had used a more standard format, easier to parse and generate from any language. JSON would have been a better option I think, given the abundance of tooling around it. -- 1: https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/wiki/List-of-generators... 2: https://ninja-build.org/manual.html#ref_ninja_fil
Read the rest
e
In The success and failure of Ninja (2020)
einpoklum·Nov 28, 2024
### Statistics ### ninja has ~26 kloc, ~3,100 commits, and only a quarter of them by the original author (although by loc changed their weight is higher). Interesting! https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/graphs/contributors ### Bunch of other comments ### > users of ninja ... all Meson projects, which appears to increasingly be the build system used in the free software world; So, AFAICT, that hasn't turned out to be the case. > the code ends up being less important than the architecture, and the architecture ends up being less important than social issues. Well... sometimes. Other times, the fact that there's good code that does something goes a very long way, and people live with the architectural faults. And as for the social issues - they rarely stand in opposition to the code itself. > Some pieces of Ninja took struggle to get to an
Read the rest
d then are obvious in retrospect. I think this is true of much of math Yup. And the some of the rest of math becomes obvious when some re-derives it using alternative and more convenient/powerful techniques. > I think the reason so few succeed at this is that it's just too tempting to mix the layers. As an author of a library that also focuses on being a "layer" of sorts (https://github.com/eyalroz/cuda-api-wrappers/), I struggle with this temptation a lot! Especially when, like the author says, the boundaries of the layers are not as clear as one might imagine. > I strongly believe that iteration time has a huge impact on programmer satisfaction I'm pretty certain that the vast majority developers perform 10x more incremental builds than full builds. So, not just satisfaction - it's just most of what we do. It's also those builds which we wait-out rather than possible go look for some distraction: https://xkcd.com/303/ OTOH, the article doesn't mention interaction with build artifact caching schemes, which lessen the difference between building from scratch and building incrementally. > Peter Collingbourne found Ninja and did the work to plug it into the much more popular CMake ... If anyone is responsible for making Ninja succeed out there in the real world, Peter is due the credit. It is so gratifying when a person you didn't know makes your software project that much more impactful! Makes you really feel optimistic again about humanity and socialism and stuff.
In The success and failure of Ninja (2020)
evmar·Jun 26, 2024
[ninja author] I like how their example is a build system, given Ninja constructs an object literally called "Plan"[1]. However, when I later revisited the design of Ninja I found that removing the separate planning phase better reflected the dynamic nature of how builds end up working out, where you discover information during the build that impacts what work you have planned. See the "Single pass" discussion in my design notes[2], which includes some negatives of the change. If the author reads this, in [2] I made a Rust-based Ninja rewrite that has some similar data structures to those in the blog post, you might find it interesting! [1] https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/blob/dcefb838534a56b262... [2] https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2022/03/n2.html
In The plan-execute pattern
nyanpasu64·May 11, 2022
> Since the linker's input file is created not by humans but by the compiler, it is unlikely that the linker takes a corrupted file as an input. Therefore, the policy did not actually increase a crash rate. The code that trusts input was much simpler than the one that does not trust any byte of an input file. Interestingly I have encountered crashes in Ninja (not lld), caused by corrupted on-disk state I had to delete: https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/issues/1978. I think I traced it down to a memory indexing or null pointer error, which would've been caught by asserts but they were disabled in release builds.
In My story on “worse is better” (2018)

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