Short answer: write a ninja configuration generator instead. > ... Where other build systems are high-level languages, Ninja aims to be an assembler. > ... Ni

Short answer: write a ninja configuration generator instead. > ... Where other build systems are high-level languages, Ninja aims to be an assembler. > ... Ninja is intended to be used with a separate program generating its input files. > ... Ninja is pretty easy to implement for the fun 20% of it and the remaining 80% is "just" some fiddly details. There are many ninja generators out there already [1] but writing a simple, custom one shouldn't be too hard [2] and could make sense for some projects. BTW, ninja is great but I wish the configuration file had used a more standard format, easier to parse and generate from any language. JSON would have been a better option I think, given the abundance of tooling around it. -- 1: https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/wiki/List-of-generators-producing-ninja-build-files https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/wiki/List-of-generators... 2: https://ninja-build.org/manual.html#ref_ninja_file https://ninja-build.org/manual.html#ref_ninja_file