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whoa, kati (github.com/google/kati) is awesome. i'm using some makefiles with a large (>1s with no changes) hot rebuild latency that is intensely irritating. built kati, spent a few minutes figuring out the things it didn't quite like, now hot rebuilds are -instant-

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Doesn't it just convert makefiles to ninja?

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yep. and the problem with the makefiles was that they spawned a bunch of shell processes, including two `python3`s, each of which promptly went to import site.py...

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So what allowed ninja to speed that up?

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Oh actually noticed this reply after I posted.

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Daniel Micay

@DanielMicay

Nov 29, 2020

Replying to @kure_ji_neko and @whitequark

It uses lower time complexity algorithms, avoids lots of unnecessary work and has built-in implementations of commonly used shell commands. It has clever things like a built-in $(shell find) where it can track the timestamps of those directories and avoid running find again.

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ninja is also a very fast backend, but it's doing a lot more than just the bare minimum of reimplementing GNU make on top of ninja. It can also be taught to do more as needed. The Linux kernel is a great example of where using kati would be a huge boost to productivity.

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The Linux kernel build system also likely has poorly performing high-level GNU make patterns where kati could be taught to optimize for it, as they did for Android. I expect Google is going to make kati work for the Linux kernel and therefore isn't going to stop maintaining it.

2:01 PM · Nov 29, 2020Twitter Web App

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