The post (quoted above in a comment) describes some of the features the Android engineers liked. This old post from when Ninja was first released discusses "wh

The post (quoted above in a comment) describes some of the features the Android engineers liked. This old post from when Ninja was first released discusses "why not just improve make": http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2011/02/ninja.html http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2011/02/ninja.h... With another four years of perspective, I think the things Ninja does could not have been added to make without forking Make (perhaps even the build file syntax), at which point there's little point in starting with the Make code. For example Ninja builds in parallel by default (like the -j flag to Make); you couldn't make that change in Make because existing users have builds that don't work in parallel. (Disclaimer: Ninja author, no involvement in the Android work.)