Editing Building with Ninja (section)

== Ninja compared to Make for building Weissblatt ==
Traditionally Weissblatt's engine used to be built using [[wikipedia:Make_(software)|Make]], the traditional UNIX build system for C/C++ programs. However, there are multiple reasons to consider migrating to a more modern build system:

# The engine's Makefile has grown large, complex and hard to maintain over the years.
# Although building with a working Makefile is simple on UNIX-like systems, Make's dependency on a UNIX-like environment makes cross-platform development difficult. Ideally, the game's main build system should be system-agnostic to ease maintenance.
# To alleviate the problem described in 2), the Windows build system already relies on CMake separately of the Makefile for UNIX builds. Since CMake is already considered standard tooling in modern C/C++ development - especially for cross-platform development - CMake poses an easy to implement, system-agnostic alternative to the current Makefile system.
Ninja is particularly noteworthy here because it is explicitly designed to have it's build files generated by higher order build systems and is thus well integrated into the already-used CMake. Thus instead of shipping the repository with a single unified and hard to maintain Makefile to build the game on all systems, the game's potential future build system shifts towards relying on the already cross-platform CMake to generate Ninja build files tailored to each developer's individual development system.