When comparing GNU Make 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 GNU Make is ranked 3rd. 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
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Uses the full power of the UNIX shell
Make takes advantage of the powerful UNIX shell, using it at it's full potential. STDIN and STDOUT are especially useful because of their versatility.
Pro No need for wrapper modules
Other build tools need wrapper modules to do certain tasks. The biggest disadvantage of these wrapper modules is that they bind you to a version of that tool. With Make you don't have that problem, there's no need for wrappers and no tools to bind you to a version, you can use any version of Make that you want.
Pro Works with more than just node.js
Since it's written in C and can be found in all UNIX-based systems it can be used on platforms other than node.js.
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 Doesn't run on Windows by default
Make requires Cygwin/msys2/MinGW to run on Windows.
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.