Someone rewrote ninja from scratch in C at one point and it's shockingly tiny. (...

chubot · on Nov 20, 2018

I found samurai and it is indeed tiny! ~3400 lines was less than I was expecting for *.[ch] !

https://github.com/michaelforney/samurai

Ninja isn't too big though. It looks like about 13K of non-test code, which is great for a mature and popular project. Punting build logic to a higher layer seems to have been a big win :)