samurai

samurai

samurai is a ninja-compatible build tool written in C99 with a focus on simplicity, speed, and portability.

Status

samurai implements the ninja build language through version 1.9.0 except for MSVC dependency handling (deps = msvc). It uses the same format for .ninja_log and .ninja_deps as ninja, currently version 5 and 4 respectively.

It is feature-complete and supports most of the same options as ninja.

Requirements

samurai requires various POSIX.1-2008 interfaces.

Scheduling jobs based on load average requires the non-standard getloadavg function. This feature can be enabled by defining HAVE_GETLOADAVG in your CFLAGS, along with any other necessary definitions for your platform.

Spawning subprocesses is done using posix_spawn. If this interface isn't available on your operating system, define NO_POSIX_SPAWN in your CFLAGS to use fork and exec instead.

samurai uses clock_gettime, which requires -l rt when linking on some operating systems to ensure that this interface is made available. While it is a POSIX requirement to support this flag (even if it's a no-op), some operating systems don't. If you get an error about a missing rt library, you can build without it by clearing LDLIBS.

Building

samurai can be built with make. CFLAGS and LDLIBS can be set in the environment, or straight on the command-line.

Differences from ninja

samurai tries to match ninja behavior as much as possible, but there are several cases where it is slightly different:

• samurai uses the variable lookup order documented in the ninja manual, while ninja has a quirk (ninja-build/ninja#1516) that if the build edge has no variable bindings, the variable is looked up in file scope before the rule-level variables.
• samurai schedules jobs using a stack, so the last scheduled job is the first to execute, while ninja schedules jobs based on the pointer value of the edge structure (they are stored in a std::set), so the first to execute depends on the address returned by malloc. This may result in build failures due to insufficiently specified dependencies in the project's build system.
• samurai does not post-process the job output in any way, so if it includes escape sequences they will be preserved, while ninja strips escape sequences if standard output is not a terminal. Some build systems, like meson, force color output from gcc by default using -fdiagnostics-color=always, so if you plan to save the output to a log, you should pass -Db_colorout=auto to meson.
• samurai follows the POSIX Utility Syntax Guidelines, in particular guideline 9, so it requires that any command-line options precede the operands. It does not do GNU-style argument permutation.