FAQ

Why does my program with colored output not have color under Ninja?

Because Ninja runs commands in parallel, it buffers their output to prevent it from interleaving. Commands will detect that their output is not directed to a terminal, assume they're going to a log file, and turn off their colored output. To fix this, pass flags to the subcommand (like -fcolor-diagnostics to clang) to force color on. Ninja itself will detect if it's writing to a terminal color escape codes from commands if it isn't.

Ninja could use pseudo ttys to work around this further, but different systems have different limits on the number of ptys available. I also worry that commands like svn up would assume they can interact with the user.

Does Ninja support Python 3?

Using Ninja for your project is language-agnostic. Internally Ninja uses Python 2 to build itself. It is my belief that systems where /usr/bin/python is not Python 2 are broken (given that we can't go back in time and add a /usr/bin/python2 on existing systems; see also this discussion). However, I've grudgingly accepted patches to make the code run under Python 3 when they're not horrifically ugly.