samurai VS shake

Samurai is a faster, drop-in replacement for ninja.

https://github.com/michaelforney/samurai

"If you want to do what "scrappy Google" did these days, then you should use Python + Ninja."

Or, better yet, use a simpler, faster and more portable^1 Ninja written in C.

https://github.com/michaelforney/samurai

1. The "simpler, faster, and more portable", are the author's claims, not mine. I am not the author.

Why is Python not portable, as in, on which systems is "build Python and then use that to run Meson" not a reasonable option?

The CI for boson seems like it runs on platforms where Python definitely is available, but also I notice the CI uses samurai, a reimplementation of ninja with a similar motivation: https://github.com/michaelforney/samurai

Ninja is in C++ so I am even more confused at Sanurai.

Is this just an implementation-diversity thing? (which is great!)

This means ninja is popular both on embedded for its tiny footprint (samurai is about 3k sloc and portable), and for humongous projects like Chrome, because it is infinitely scalable in complexity due to its genaration method.

You could probably post-process samurai (a rewrite of ninja into C) into a single-file: https://github.com/michaelforney/samurai

Another interesting implementation is Shake: https://shakebuild.com/

It is technically a Haskell DSL, but supports Ninja files, time estimates and has tools for linting and profiling.

They explicitly refer to Shake build system and Build Systems a la Carte paper.

The one paper that gave me hope about build systems was Build systems à la carte: Theory and practice, by Andrey Mokhov, Neil Mitchell, and Simon Peyton Jones. Among other things, it describes the theoretical underpinnings of the Shake build system. To be honest I believe any build system that ignores the maths described in this paper can safely be ignored. (You may however ignore the paper itself if the maths checks out. See Daniel J. Bernstein's redo, which matches Shake very closely.)

Yeah, they don't have to be terrible. I haven't used it, but people in my circles tend to really like Shake, which uses a Haskell embedded DSL to describe builds.

You could try Shake. It's a sane build system written by a former co-worker of mine. https://shakebuild.com/

Shake does require compilation as it's essentially just a Haskell library providing a DSL and it works just fine, I guess in gradle's case it's a thing about Java-typical overengineering and complete blindness to resource usage. Shake's underlying engine can actually go head-to-head with ninja itself when building ninja files.

Did you look at shake: https://shakebuild.com/ ?

For reasons I don't want to get into, I am building my own GHC package without cabal. The documentation is a little sketchy, but I've succeeded in build and installing it in my own user database (I'm on linux x86_64, using GHC 8.6.5). I am using shake to do all of this, and I've been pretty pleased with how it works.