Faster Than Ninja

Ninja is often used as a performance benchmark for build systems, but it benefits from pre-generation work by tools like CMake, which takes 15.6 seconds—making the actual build time 19 seconds rather than Ninja's reported 3.4 seconds. The build2 system, a modern native build tool that doesn't require a generation step, achieved nearly comparable performance at 3.8 seconds (only 11% slower than Ninja) when building the Xerces-C++ XML parser project.