Ninjafiles are not designed to be edited by hand, it expects more sane, language-aware tooling to generate the dependency graph, for ninja to execute. https://n

Ninjafiles are not designed to be edited by hand, it expects more sane, language-aware tooling to generate the dependency graph, for ninja to execute. https://ninja-build.org/manual.html#_design_goals https://ninja-build.org/manual.html#_design_goals Though you could also argue that writing makefiles by hand is equally foolish. Use a tool designed for the job and not some duct tape that “works” everywhere but barely keeps things together. The example in the OP is missing handling of headers #including other headers, just to give one obvious example.