Little nin' is ninja's little sibling.
Nin is an experimental fork of ninja translated in Go.
Install go1.17 or later.
go install github.com/maruel/nin/cmd/nin@latest
Use nin where you would have used ninja (or create a symlink).
Yeah.
The reason it's possible at all is because ninja is well written and has a reasonable amount of unit tests.
- The parser can be used as a
library
- This opens the door to a lot of opportunity and a real ecosystem
- Refactoring Go >> refactoring C++
- As I made progress, I saw opportunities for simplification
- Making the code concurrent (e.g. making the parser parallel) is easier
- Plans to have it be stateful and/or do RPCs and change fundamental parts
- E.g. call directly the RBE backend instead of shelling out reclient?
- It's easier to keep the performance promise in check, and keep it maintainable
- Go has native benchmarking
- Go has native CPU and memory profiling
- Go has native code coverage
- Go has native documentation
- Since it's GC, and the program runs as a one shot, we can just disable GC and save a significant amount of memory management (read: CPU) overhead.
I'll write a better roadmap if the project doesn't crash and burn.
Some people did advent of code 2021, I did a brain teaser instead.
- Go's slice and string bound checking slow things down, I'll have to micro optimize a bit.
- Go's function calls are more expensive and the Go compiler inlines less often than the C++ compiler. I'll reduce the number of function calls.
- Go's Windows layer is likely slower than raw C++, so I'll probably call raw syscall functions on Windows.
- Staying up to date changes done upstream, especially to the file format and correctness checks.
- Manifest (build.ninja) parsing: 5% faster on average! 📉
- Latency: nin is in the same ballpark (-5%) for building ninja itself.
- CPU usage: about 15% higher, has to be optimized.
- 16 test cases out of 394 (5%) have to be fixed.
git grep Skip..TODO | wc -lversusgit grep "^func Test" | wc -l. - Closely tracking upstream as-is.
- Flag parsing is not 100% compatible yet.
See PERF.md to learn how to measure performance yourself, since I know myself enough that I will forget to update the stats above and it will get better over time.
Ninja is a small build system with a focus on speed. https://ninja-build.org/
See the manual or
doc/manual.asciidoc included in the distribution for background
and more details.