When comparing Rake vs Ninja, the Slant community recommends Ninja for most people. In the question“What are the best open-source build systems for C/C++?” Ninja is ranked 1st while Rake is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose Ninja is:
Once dependencies like maven are installed it is up and running in minutes with one simple command.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Powerful language
You can write code for your build system in Ruby. While not my choice for general programming, Ruby is powerful and expressive. Given some knowledge of Ruby, you can create powerful Rake extensions that result in your average target only needing a few lines in the rakefile in spite of having complex behaviors (Is the library for public consumption, or only for use within the current repo/tier? Compile certain files on certain platforms? Link to libraries published from other repos? etc.).
Pro Simple set up
Once dependencies like maven are installed it is up and running in minutes with one simple command.
Pro Easy horizontal scaling
Ninja is stateless by design. This makes horizontal scaling very easy and just a matter of adding servers.
Cons
Con Slooooow
For large codebases or with complex extensions, Rake can become quite slow. I'm aware of one codebase on which it can take 15 minutes to determine that no changes have been made and no recompilation is necessary.
Con Little user choice in organization
Since most of the code and folder structure are automatically generated, this leaves little room to the developer on how they will organize their project.