Ninja is a small build system with a focus on speed. http://martine.github.com/ninja/ See the manual -- http://martine.github.com/ninja/manual.html or doc/manual.asciidoc included in the distribution -- for background and more details. To build, run ./bootstrap.py. It first blindly compiles all non-test source files together, then re-builds Ninja using itself. You should end up with a 'ninja' binary in the source root. Run './ninja -h' for help. There is no installation step. The only file of interest to a user is the resulting ninja binary.