Add validation inputs

[Colecf]

These were added to regular ninja in: https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/commit/04c410b15b70fb321928ffba19d697db15cb0121

Android uses them, so they're needed to port android to n2. (which is something I'm exploring but not committing to)

[evmar]

This is so cool! I'm very curious about whether n2 works out for Android.

I think there's likely some easy low hanging perf fruit but I haven't tried n2 yet on any reasonably large build -- the app I worked on had like 1k edges total. I think the architecture is mostly in the right to be able to scale, but there are surely some simple things I overlooked, like maybe some O(n) in the number of ready edges or something silly like that.

And further I think it would be relatively easy to add larger ideas like multithreading for build.ninja parsing if that's useful.

In general, if you have any build.ninja files to share for investigating, or feature requests or observations etc., I'd love to hear them and help out where I can!

[evmar]

Also, if for Android purposes you wanted to explore more invasive changes like a binary file format, I would be happy to explain any part of n2 you need. But from this PR it feels like you already have pretty much gotten it.

[Colecf]

Thanks! I'm glad you're open to supporting android. Upstream backing is definitely a factor in the switch.

There's still a lot of work/investigation to port android to n2, but some other thoughts I had while looking into it:

• Currently we hit the "used generated file, but has no dependency path to it" error, which is probably an issue in our ninja file
• We rely on a number of flags that are currently unsupported in n2, but maybe they're not all necessary. The frontend_file flag is pretty important though.
• Our ninja fork does have multithreaded parsing. I haven't benchmarked the difference between it and n2 yet.
• I'm not sure a binary format would be feasible for us, because all of our build system rules emit ninja code as mostly raw strings. So if there was a binary format, we'd have to either do a ton of work to rewrite all the rules or parse the text and convert it to binary.
• I'm also investigating adding action sandboxing (probably with nsjail) and remote build (RBE) support to ninja. I was thinking maybe instead of shoehorning that into ninja/n2 (particuarly RBE), it might be better if n2 had some kind of plugin api to offload executing the actions to another program. And that program could do the RBE calls.
• Some other minor features that our ninja fork has are an ETA based on prior runs, and the ability to tag build actions for later analysis.

[evmar]

Now that we're on the subject, didn't I see some rumor about Android switching to bazel? Is that still happening?

[Colecf]

Unfortunately the migration to bazel was recently cancelled. :/

[evmar]

Is it worth opening bugs about the remaining issues? Re the frontend_file, I had experimented a bit with https://github.com/evmar/n2/pull/34 which feels pretty similar, and had ideas like https://www.figma.com/file/ewO2MBU5MXlt5i3cZsoBrC/Ninja-VSCode-integration?type=design&node-id=0%3A1&mode=design&t=taX8UFxmqs7Xo0II-1