Faster Than Ninja
Faster Than Ninja Posted on 5 Aug 2026 by Boris Kolpackov Some months ago I read an article about a tool for snooping on slow build systems that can be used to find build bottlenecks. While the whole article is quite illuminating, this quote stood out to me: Ninja is not a 100% fair comparison to other tools, because it benefits from some "baked in" build logic by the tool that created the ninja file, but I think it's a reasonable "speed of light" performance benchmark for build systems. To clarify, by "baked in" the author means that nobody writes Ninja build files by hand.
- ▪Faster Than Ninja Posted on 5 Aug 2026 by Boris Kolpackov Some months ago I read an article about a tool for snooping on slow build systems that can be used to find build bottlenecks.
- ▪While the whole article is quite illuminating, this quote stood out to me: Ninja is not a 100% fair comparison to other tools, because it benefits from some "baked in" build logic by the tool that created the ninja file, but I think it's a
- ▪To clarify, by "baked in" the author means that nobody writes Ninja build files by hand.
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| Original publisher | Build2 |
| Canonical URL | https://build2.org/blog/faster-than-ninja.xhtml |
| Publication time | Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:33:25 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-05T14:30:41.580Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-05T14:30:41.580Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
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| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
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| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Faster Than Ninja Posted on 5 Aug 2026 by Boris Kolpackov Some months ago I read an article about a tool for snooping on slow build systems that can be used to find build bottlenecks. While the whole article is quite illuminating, this quote stood out to me: Ninja is not a 100% fair comparison to other tools, because it benefits from some "baked in" build logic by the tool that created the ninja file, but I think it's a reasonable "speed of light" performance benchmark for build systems. To clarify, by "baked in" the author means that nobody writes Ninja build files by hand. Rather, a second tool, such as CMake, is invoked to generate them and some steps performed during this generation phase (examples below) should ideally be part of the build phase.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Build2.
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