samurai is a ninja-compatible build tool written in C99 with a focus on simplicity, speed, and portability.
samurai implements the ninja build language through version 1.9.0 except
for MSVC dependency handling (deps = msvc). It uses the same format
for .ninja_log and .ninja_deps as ninja, currently version 5 and 4
respectively.
It is feature-complete and supports most of the same options as ninja.
samurai requires various POSIX.1-2008 interfaces.
Scheduling jobs based on load average requires through the non-standard, but
widely available getloadavg function. This feature can be disabled by
defining the NO_GETLOADAVG macro when calling the C compiler.
samurai tries to match ninja behavior as much as possible, but there are several cases where it is slightly different:
- samurai uses the variable lookup order documented in the ninja manual, while ninja has a quirk (ninja-build/ninja#1516) that if the build edge has no variable bindings, the variable is looked up in file scope before the rule-level variables.
- samurai schedules jobs using a stack, so the last scheduled job is
the first to execute, while ninja schedules jobs based on the pointer
value of the edge structure (they are stored in a
std::set<Edge*>), so the first to execute depends on the address returned bymalloc. This may result in build failures due to insufficiently specified dependencies in the project's build system. - samurai does not post-process the job output in any way, so if it
includes escape sequences they will be preserved, while ninja strips
escape sequences if standard output is not a terminal. Some build
systems, like meson, force color output from gcc by default using
-fdiagnostics-color=always, so if you plan to save the output to a log, you should pass-Db_colorout=autoto meson. - samurai follows the POSIX Utility Syntax Guidelines, in particular guideline 9, so it requires that any command-line options precede the operands. It does not do GNU-style argument permutation.