A Distributed Front-end for GCC

format writes "distcc is a distributed front-end for GCC, meaning you can compile that big project across n number of machines and get it done almost n times as fast. The machines don't have to be identical or be running the exact same GCC version, but having the same OS is helpful." With the advent of faster hardware, I can't complain about kernel compile times anymore, but larger source trees could definitely benefit from this.

Comments

Interesting approach

[PineGreen]

The sun compiler suite comes with dmake, which does the same on the level of make, rather than cc, but is essentially the same.
Definitelly would make beowulf clusters interesting for compilation as well as hard core numerics (no joke intendend).

So, is it better?

[FreeLinux]

Is this better than say, Group Compiler?

Differece between distributed/parallel make?

[angel'o'sphere]

Could someone please point out the difference between a parallel and/or distributed make, like pmake?

It sounds not realy reasonable to put the coding work into gcc when you like to have yacc/bison and a bunch of perl scripts and what ever else you have in your makefile also speeded up.

Regards,
angel'o'sphere

Big benifit

[LoudMusic]

I think the biggest plus is that you can have one hella fast machine on your network running distcc that basically does all your compiling for all your other machines. I can see this being a big bonus for server farms like rackspace.com. The customers would be getting compile speeds from a big ass server, rather than just their little dinky Duron.

~LoudMusic