On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 3:34 AM, Kamil Cholewiński <harry6...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I think it might have been possible to use some other build tool to >> achieve something similar, but I don't think it would have worked out >> as well. > > http://gittup.org/tup/ ?
I think tup could have worked too, but I still prefer ninja for a few reasons: - tup uses fancy trickery to calculate dependencies of commands using a fuse filesystem. This requires setuid or user namespaces to work correctly, or else runs in a "degraded" mode (though, not quite sure how this works). - tup has more dependencies (sqlite, libfuse, lua), and as a result, larger binary size (1.4M vs 908K for static stripped binary built with -O2). - tup has a more complicated language because it is intended to be written directly instead of generated by something else. I'd have to do some experimentation to see if it could replace the rc scripts, or if I'd have to use the lua API.
