[drothlis]

I found that Ninja tries hard to build things in the order they’re listed in the build file (dependencies permitting). Whereas GNU Make... well, it does start off trying to build depth-first, but if it needs to build a target's prerequisites, it pushes that target to the very end of the queue. So Make ends up building the leaf targets at the very end -- it leaves all the linking steps until all the object files have been compiled, instead of linking each executable as soon as its own dependencies are available.

I reported that here: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-make/2016-11/msg0000...

...and the maintainer said that the behaviour isn't intentional, but after a short look at the source code I decided fixing it was going to be beyond my abilities/motivation.

(I suppose this is more relevant to full builds, not incremental ones.)