Samurai: Ninja-compatible build tool written in C | Hacker News Reader

Samurai: Ninja-compatible build tool written in C

github.com

74 pointsducktective25 comments

Neat, but I wonder what the motivation for this is. I assumed that for the majority of projects ninja itself adds little overhead to the total build time.

Maybe it saves them from having to build a c++ compiler to build ninja.

Doubtful. Both GCC and LLVM are written in C++ so you have to build a C++ compiler irrespective of whether you actually want one!

I suspect it's more that they don't like C++ and want to use C for everything. Whether that actually translates into a higher quality tool or a more performant tool, we can only imagine.

Ehhh, the creator also works on a minimalist Linux distro (Oasis) and one of their goals is to build with cproc (a C frontend for the QBE backend), all written in ISO C. He uses Samurai in his distro, so it all fits together pretty well

You can just use a GCC version < 4.8 or something like e.g. TCC if you want to avoid C++.

Though Ninja is implemented in a very moderate C++ style; I'm able to compile it even with GCC <= 4.8; it even seems to compile on pre-C++11 compilers.

Compiling gcc <= 4.8 is an exercise in pain because it needs some kernel headers which were removed.

Not a big issue for someone who maintains his own Linux version, https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis.

C project, C build tool.

There is also Muon [1] for Meson (Python).

[1]: https://sr.ht/~lattis/muon/

Muon is a very nice project; especially the bootstrap means are great; unfortunately it doesn't seem to run on Windows and personally I don't think that Meson is a much better system/language than e.g. CMake; otherwise I would have used Muon instead of implementing BUSY.

I assume you're also not using a C compiler written in C++, thus neither clang, GCC nor msvc ?

It's always beneficial if some people choose to follow idealistic routes ;)

There are minimal C compilers written in C around, though, admittedly, not as relevant as GCC/clang/MSVC

> It's always beneficial if some people choose to follow idealistic routes ;)

As much as I believe this to be true in politics, I think it's really really wrong, if not actively harmful, in tech

Why would I want to use this instead of ninja? It’s apparently a drop-in replacement but it doesn’t say what it’s trying to do better than the original.

Probably for teams that fight for honor and need an armored defense bonus to withstand medium to heavy attacks

The code is readable and maintainable, and can be used in the Linux distro that the author maintains without pulling in a huge number of dependencies to build a C++ compiler.

https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis

https://sr.ht/~mcf/cproc/

“written in C99 with a focus on simplicity, speed, and portability” is what appears to differentiate it from ninja. if that sounds interesting you should check it out and if not skip it

Ninja is already fast, simple, and portable, so those aren’t differentiating factors. It appears to just be ninja but written in a different programming language.

It not depending on Python seems useful for non-Python ecosystems.

Neat. I like keeping track of ninja implementations (I'm a CMake developer), but it's unfortunate how many end up skipping `dyndep` support (granted, it is not trivial) because it is necessary to reliably build C++20 modules (and Fortran modules FWIW).

It's probably fine since it seems to be built for a minimal platform where saying "no" to C++ (nevermind C++20) is possible, but I wonder how many people know that the number of tools that can reliably support C++20 is far smaller than it has been historically.

This reminds me of yet another alternative implementation of ninja: N2

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30806875

Notably this is made by the original author of Ninja.

I feel the name should have been "Shinobi" for maximum pun-ity

Depends.

The improvement upon the program 'more' was named 'less'. It seems to be a tradition to choose opposites rather than similar words.

Samurai were warrior-governors of Japan, much like Knights. Their opposite and enemy were ninjas/Shinobi, the spies and assassin's of Japan.

make/kati is another example, Meaning lose/win in Japanese.

> written in C

this phrase is such rarity in titles these days, that it is newsworthy in itself.

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