Nice to see that WAF, being python is competitive. It goes to show that smart ca...

kodr · on Jan 1, 2016

Agreed, but it seems those benchmarks were made to promote wonderbuild. I'm not sure if it's still updated (it doesn't seem so), and it uses old versions for cmake and waf.

it would also be nice to compare other build system like ninja+meson.

berkut · on Jan 1, 2016

It's only really SCons which gives Python as a build system a bad name in terms of speed in my experience.

waterhouse · on Jan 1, 2016

And judging by the "number of system calls" section, SCons's performance problems don't appear to be due to the Python runtime.

bjohan · on Jan 2, 2016

I'd say Python's runtime only has a small fixed startup cost that prevent it from beating natively-compiled tools in no-op rebuilds (when no source file has changed). Some tools like tup or ninja reach insanely low times that are below the startup time of Python itself. But at such low times, it doesn't matter anymore whether it's 10ms or 100ms.