Penetrate: Getting a 250k-user app removed and why Android antivirus apps suck
underdev.org2 pointsby defer0 comments
Android, which uses it for some large component of the system that I've never quite understood
Ninja is really a huge part of AOSP, the build system initially used makefiles. Things got complex really fast with a custom declarative build system (soong) and a failed/aborted migration to bazel. Google developed kati (https://github.com/google/kati) which converts Makefiles to ninja build files (or should I say file), which really is huge: λ wc -l out/build-qssi.ninja
3035442 out/build-qssi.ninja
Going from makefiles/soong to ninja is painful, it takes several minutes even in a modern machine but it simply flies once ninja picks it up.
The format is not secret either, it's just binary encoded.