

Kati – An experimental GNU make clone - knowbody
https://github.com/google/kati

======
michaelhoffman
The Ninja it converts to appears to be here:

[https://martine.github.io/ninja/](https://martine.github.io/ninja/)

~~~
rspeer
I'm a big fan of Ninja: it applies the philosophy of "do one thing and do it
well" to build systems. It takes in a dependency graph and a list of build
rules, and it builds stuff in parallel.

Like Make, you can use it to build a lot of different kinds of things, and it
doesn't care what programming language you're using.

Unlike Make, it doesn't give you its own idiosyncratic, messy, easily-misused
programming language for defining your dependency graph. The dependency graph
is just an input that comes from somewhere else. You can make it in a
reasonable programming language, or apparently now you can make it out of a
Makefile using Kati.

Because it's not trying to support decades of Makefile hacks, Ninja can do
things that would be dangerous to do in Make, such as a single build step that
reads M files and writes N files without any extra locking or bookkeeping.

------
black_knight
How does it compare to mk[0]?

mk was make done better for Plan 9.

[0] [http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/mk.html](http://plan9.bell-
labs.com/sys/doc/mk.html)

~~~
koenigdavidmj
mk and Ninja (the target to which Kati compiles) appear to be almost
equivalent to each other, except that mk has patterns ("here is how to compile
any .c file into a .o file") and Ninja requires that each target be written
explicitly ("here is how to compile foo.c into foo.o", once per file).

This is okay, because mk is meant to be written by humans and Ninja is meant
to be a target for compilers like Kati and cmake.

~~~
oso2k
Make uses patterns as well, especially if you're "Doing It Right"(tm)
[0][1][2].

[0]
[http://git.suckless.org/st/tree/Makefile#n6](http://git.suckless.org/st/tree/Makefile#n6)

[1]
[http://git.suckless.org/st/tree/Makefile#n7](http://git.suckless.org/st/tree/Makefile#n7)

[2]
[http://git.suckless.org/st/tree/Makefile#n20](http://git.suckless.org/st/tree/Makefile#n20)

------
ngrilly
Why two versions of the code in Go and C++?

------
worik
Why? A wheel with less corners...

~~~
rurban
Some people on bigger projects are tired of waiting for their builds and test
results, so they wrote something better and faster. => ninja

On bigger projects waiting 60min or 10min or 2min makes a difference.

kati so far converts traditional makefile recipes into ninja builds.

