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Note that if you want to go a bit further, you should make your own minimal build system that replaces CMake. That alone will make your project compile much faster!

I've made my own in Python that generates Ninja files only - and it's surprisingly not that much work (especially if Claude Code can help you).

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But CMake only reruns, when CMakeLists.txt has changed. That doesn't happen a lot after the core of the project has been set up for me. Especially not when I am tweaking a game mechanic or something.

Also if you want your project to compile with Ninja on Linux, but also with MSVC and you want cross-compilation (on Linux for Windows) and an Emscripten build (I do want all of those), then rebuilding CMake is quite a lot of work.

Sounds interesting! Have you published this somewhere? I wonder how well this works when you want to compile some complex dependencies. Have you compared compile times between your solution and when using CMake?

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