ninja VS CMake

Compare ninja vs CMake and see what are their differences.

ninja

a small build system with a focus on speed (by ninja-build)
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ninja CMake
51 32
10,506 6,434
1.7% 1.6%
7.9 10.0
3 days ago about 15 hours ago
C++ C
Apache License 2.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

ninja

Posts with mentions or reviews of ninja. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-26.
  • TypeScript's Successor is Waiting, and You'll Never Want to Turn Back
    1 project | dev.to | 29 Jan 2024
    Under the hood, Rescript uses a build system called Ninja. Ninja is similar to Make, but cross-platform and more minimal/performant.
  • Using Make – writing less Makefile
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Dec 2023
  • Ask HN: What outdated tech are you still using and are perfectly happy with?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Oct 2023
    Really? I thought most new projects were switching to ninja[^1] and have never used it.

    [^1]: https://ninja-build.org/

  • What was used to build C++ programs before Cmake?
    5 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 5 Jul 2023
  • I have spent two whole work days trying to install GLEW
    6 projects | /r/GraphicsProgramming | 3 Jul 2023
    warning: Starting with the September 2023 release, the default triplet for vcpkg libraries will change from x86-windows to the detected host triplet (x64-windows). To resolve this message, add --triplet x86-windows to keep the same behavior. Computing installation plan... The following packages will be built and installed: * egl-registry:x86-windows -> 2022-09-20 glew:x86-windows -> 2.2.0#3 * opengl:x86-windows -> 2022-12-04#3 * opengl-registry:x86-windows -> 2022-09-29#1 * vcpkg-cmake:x64-windows -> 2023-05-04 * vcpkg-cmake-config:x64-windows -> 2022-02-06#1 Additional packages (*) will be modified to complete this operation. Detecting compiler hash for triplet x86-windows... A suitable version of powershell-core was not found (required v7.2.11) Downloading portable powershell-core 7.2.11... Downloading powershell-core... https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v7.2.11/PowerShell-7.2.11-win-x86.zip->C:\vcpkg\downloads\PowerShell-7.2.11-win-x86.zip Downloading https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases/download/v7.2.11/PowerShell-7.2.11-win-x86.zip Extracting powershell-core... error: while detecting compiler information: The log file content at "C:\vcpkg\buildtrees\detect_compiler\stdout-x86-windows.log" is: -- Downloading https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/releases/download/v1.10.2/ninja-win.zip -> ninja-win-1.10.2.zip... -- Configuring x86-windows CMake Error at scripts/cmake/vcpkg_execute_required_process.cmake:112 (message): Command failed: C:/vcpkg/downloads/tools/ninja/1.10.2-windows/ninja.exe -v Working Directory: C:/vcpkg/buildtrees/detect_compiler/x86-windows-rel/vcpkg-parallel-configure Error code: 1 See logs for more information: C:\vcpkg\buildtrees\detect_compiler\config-x86-windows-rel-CMakeCache.txt.log C:\vcpkg\buildtrees\detect_compiler\config-x86-windows-out.log
  • Installer script for CMake, Ninja, and Meson
    4 projects | /r/bash | 1 Jun 2023
    I thought I would share my custom installer script for the latest GitHub versions of CMake, Ninja, and Meson.
  • Building and Running Pidgin and Finch 3
    3 projects | dev.to | 6 May 2023
    Now that you have your build system all generated you can go ahead and build everything. By default Meson will use Ninja as the build tool. Ninja is similar to Make but much much faster. You can also generate additional build systems but that's outside of the scope of this post.
  • Is there any way to configure my project so I can work on it on both Windows and MacOS?
    2 projects | /r/sdl | 16 Apr 2023
    There are also some other tools like https://ninja-build.org/ that you might prefer using instead
  • Bitdefender blocked Explorer.exe and Ninja.exe has been quarantined
    1 project | /r/antivirus | 16 Feb 2023
    I got Ninja from https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja, latest release. I'm assuming this is a false positive?
  • Just: A Command Runner
    27 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jan 2023
    Oh excellent, then better (and more portable!) tools are available:

    http://pants.build

    https://ninja-build.org

    https://buck.build

    and, if you hate yourself: https://bazel.build

CMake

Posts with mentions or reviews of CMake. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-06-01.
  • Installer script for CMake, Ninja, and Meson
    4 projects | /r/bash | 1 Jun 2023
    I thought I would share my custom installer script for the latest GitHub versions of CMake, Ninja, and Meson.
  • CMake can't find glut
    1 project | /r/cpp_questions | 11 May 2023
    The same thing probably applies if you use the FindGlut.cmake module which is documented here: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/module/FindGLUT.html
  • FFmpeg Build Script that uses API calls to get the latest versions of each package + extra modules
    3 projects | /r/ffmpeg | 25 Apr 2023
    building cmake - version 3.26.3 ==================================== Downloading https://github.com/kitware/cmake/archive/refs/tags/v3.26.3.tar.gz as cmake-3.26.3.tar.gz Download Completed File extracted: cmake-3.26.3.tar.gz $ ./configure --prefix=/root/ffmpeg-build-script/workspace --parallel=40 --enable-ccache -- -DCMAKE_USE_OPENSSL=OFF $ make -j 40
  • I can't run my c++ project having Python.h header using cmake in Windows
    2 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 17 Apr 2023
    find_package(Python3 ...) will look for a file FindPython3.cmake shipped with CMake. I urge you to try to go over its contents to get an idea of what it does underneath.
  • using a library from a github repository in cmake project
    2 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 30 Mar 2023
    The file FindSomePKG.cmake (module approach) is supposed to be written either by you (you write it manually and put in a cmake subdirectory in your git repo) or it's an official package file shipped along with CMake, e.g FindOpenSSL.cmake with documentation here.
  • Install CMake on Windows
    1 project | dev.to | 18 Mar 2023
  • Install MariaDB from Source Code on Ubuntu
    1 project | dev.to | 13 Feb 2023
    sudo apt-get install build-essential libncurses5-dev gnutls-dev bison zlib1g-dev ccache libssl-dev # Get cmake # Downloaded under ~/ wget https://github.com/Kitware/CMake/releases/download/v3.25.2/cmake-3.25.2.tar.gz cd cmake-3.25.2 ~/cmake-3.25.2 $ ./bootstrap ~/cmake-3.25.2 $ make ~/cmake-3.25.2 $ sudo make install
  • Adding “invariant” clauses to C++ via GCC plugin to enable Design-by-Contract
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jan 2023
    Note that `assert`s are disabled if you define the macro `NDEBUG`, e.g. https://godbolt.org/z/hMWo8KM7q

    CMake adds these flags to release builds: https://github.com/Kitware/CMake/blob/e1eacbe2c522a8bf9a82af...

    Would be nice to have a non-macro solution for controlling behavior at configure time, but the `NDEBUG` macro is basically already your `DEBUG` constexpr.

  • CLion 2022.3 Released!
    1 project | /r/cpp | 1 Dec 2022
    It's open-source. It might get merged in!
  • Couchbase Node SDK on Docker
    1 project | dev.to | 14 Nov 2022
    FROM node:16 WORKDIR /cmake COPY cmake-3.25.0-rc4-linux-x86_64.sh ./ # OR # RUN apt update && apt install -y g++ wget bash # RUN wget https://github.com/Kitware/CMake/releases/download/v3.25.0-rc4/cmake-3.25.0-rc4-linux-x86_64.sh RUN ./cmake-3.25.0-rc4-linux-x86_64.sh --skip-license && rm cmake-3.25.0-rc4-linux-x86_64.sh ENV PATH="$PATH:/cmake/bin" WORKDIR /app RUN npm i [email protected] COPY package.json . COPY package-lock.json . RUN npm --verbose i COPY . . RUN npm --verbose run build

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ninja and CMake you can also consider the following projects:

meson - The Meson Build System

SCons

gcc

Bazel - a fast, scalable, multi-language and extensible build system

awesome-bazel - A curated list of Bazel rules, tooling and resources.

Invoke - Pythonic task management & command execution.

bazel-remote - A remote cache for Bazel

BitBake - The official bitbake Git is at https://git.openembedded.org/bitbake/. Do not open issues or file pull requests here.

Boost.Beast - HTTP and WebSocket built on Boost.Asio in C++11

PyBuilder - Software build automation tool for Python.

cmake-init-vcpkg-example - cmake-init generated executable project with vcpkg integration