### Statistics ###<p>ninja has ~26 kloc, ~3,100 commits, and only a quarter of them by the original author (although by loc changed their weight is higher). Interesting!<p><a href="https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/graphs/contributors">https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/graphs/contributors</a><p>### Bunch of other comments ###<p><i>> users of ninja ... all Meson projects, which appears to increasingly be the build system used in the free software world;</i><p>So, AFAICT, that hasn't turned out to be the case.<p><i>> the code ends up being less important than the architecture, and the architecture ends up being less important than social issues.</i><p>Well... sometimes. Other times, the fact that there's good code that does something goes a very long way, and people live with the architectural faults. And as for the social issues - they rarely stand in opposition to the code itself.<p><i>> Some pieces of Ninja took struggle to get to and then are obvious in retrospect. I think this is true of much of math</i><p>Yup. And the some of the rest of math becomes obvious when some re-derives it using alternative and more convenient/powerful techniques.<p><i>> I think the reason so few succeed at this is that it's just too tempting to mix the layers.</i><p>As an author of a library that also focuses on being a "layer" of sorts (<a href="https://github.com/eyalroz/cuda-api-wrappers/">https://github.com/eyalroz/cuda-api-wrappers/</a>), I struggle with this temptation a lot! Especially when, like the author says, the boundaries of the layers are not as clear as one might imagine.<p><i>> I strongly believe that iteration time has a huge impact on programmer satisfaction</i><p>I'm pretty certain that the vast majority developers perform 10x more incremental builds than full builds. So, not just satisfaction - it's just most of what we do. It's also those builds which we wait-out rather than possible go look for some distraction:<p><a href="https://xkcd.com/303/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/303/</a><p>OTOH, the article doesn't mention interaction with build artifact caching schemes, which lessen the difference between building from scratch and building incrementally.<p><i>> Peter Collingbourne found Ninja and did the work to plug it into the much more popular CMake ... If anyone is responsible for making Ninja succeed out there in the real world, Peter is due the credit.</i><p>It is so gratifying when a person you didn't know makes your software project that much more impactful! Makes you really feel optimistic again about humanity and socialism and stuff.