n2 (pronounced "into") implements enough of ninja to successfully build some projects that build with ninja.
I wrote it to explore some alternative ideas I had around how to structure a build system. In a very real sense the exploration is more important than the actual software itself, so you can view the design notes as one of the primary artifacts of this.
Here's a small demo of n2 building some of Clang.
$ cargo build --release
$ ./target/release/n2 -C some/build/dir
When CMake executes Ninja it expects some particular Ninja behaviors. n2
emulates these behaviors when invoked as ninja. To use n2 with CMake you can
create a symlink:
- UNIX:
ln -s path/to/n2 ninja - Windows(cmd):
mklink ninja.exe path\to\n2 - Windows(PowerShell):
New-Item -Type Symlink ninja.exe -Target path\to\n2
somewhere in your $PATH, such that CMake can discover it.
n2 is missing many Ninja features.
n2 does some things Ninja doesn't:
- Builds start tasks as soon as an out of date one is found, rather than gathering all the out of date tasks before executing.
- Fancier status output, modeled after Bazel.
-d tracegenerates a performance trace as used by Chrome'sabout:tracingor alternatives (speedscope, perfetto).