Yeah it's true, on the face of it, they aren't directly comparable. You do need a generator and GNU Make has more features. There's some more color here: htt

Yeah it's true, on the face of it, they aren't directly comparable. You do need a generator and GNU Make has more features. There's some more color here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32382760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32382760 (I borrowed ninja_syntax.py, and it worked very well, but I don't claim that will work for everybody.) However I also cringe when people say to write GNU makefiles from scratch -- because those ALSO don't work for everybody, and are generated more often than not (e.g. by autotools, CMake, kconfig, etc.) So I'd say that GNU make gives you the illusion that you can just use that one tool, but you often end up needing to generate it anyway. And then you should have used Ninja with whatever generator you ended up with :)