PERFORMANCE Signal 377 2 feeds carried it
Faster Than Ninja
↗
Illustration only Photo by reyna on Unsplash
A performance comparison shows that the build2 build system can match Ninja's build speed when its advanced features are disabled, challenging Ninja's reputation as the fastest possible.
For engineers choosing a build system, this comparison indicates that Ninja's speed advantage is partly due to offloading work to a generation step (like CMake), which adds time. build2 offers more built-in features (like token-based change tracking) that can be disabled to achieve similar performance, giving teams flexibility without sacrificing speed.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
build2 matched Ninja's build time for a full from-scratch build of Xerces-C++ after disabling its token-based change tracking.
Ninja's 'speed of light' reputation is misleading because it excludes the time spent by tools like CMake to generate Ninja files.
build2 provides features like precise change tracking and file cache compression that Ninja lacks, but these add overhead that can be turned off.
THE CLUSTER