Wrong question; they're working on different levels of abstraction. Ninja is designed to be a very fast and lightweight tool for doing work based on a dependency graph: actually knowing how to build anything on its own is an explicit non-goal.

Premake, on the other hand is a full-blown build system that can make decisions and knows about how to perform specific code-related tasks, and can then generate rules for other tools to follow. Unless I'm mistaken, Premake could hypothetically output a build.ninja file.

It seems to be faster (starts building faster) and gives progress information make lacks. See http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2011/02/ninja.h... (for motivation) and https://plus.google.com/108996039294665965197/posts/SfhrFAhR... (for benchmarks). TLDR: Firefox takes 14m to fully build with make and a nop build takes 57.9s, Chrome takes 30m with ninja, but a nop build takes only 0.74s.

I don't know the design goals of premake but ninja is very very fast at deciding what to build (a no-op build of a large project that might take a traditional make system several seconds, is almost instantaneous with ninja, allegedly).

For those already using CMake--ninja will slot right in.

Are there any large projects using premake? Ninja+gyp is used by Chromium.