Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Distcc: A fast, free distributed C/C++ compiler

distcc.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 103 posts

Re: Distcc: A fast, free distributed C/C++ compiler

#51

Post by jgraham »

jchw wrote: post #45

Related: https://github.com/icecc/icecream - another option that does what distcc does, but aimed at a somewhat different use case. https://ccache.dev/ - a similar idea but provides caching of build outputs instead of distributing builds. You can use it together with distcc to achieve even better performance.

https://github.com/mozilla/sccache is another option which addresses the use cases of both icecream and ccache (and also supports Rust, and cloud storage of artifacts, if those are useful for you)

Re: Distcc: A fast, free distributed C/C++ compiler

#52

Post by thejosh »

oretoz wrote: post #47
jchw wrote: post #45

Related: https://github.com/icecc/icecream - another option that does what distcc does, but aimed at a somewhat different use case. https://ccache.dev/ - a similar idea but provides caching of build outputs instead of distributing builds. You can use it together with distcc to achieve even better performance.

ccache is used together with distcc at the current place I am working at. Started digging at how these two work as I thought there is still room for improvement in our build times that can vary between 10 minutes to 1 hour. It is a huge code base, easily more than a million lines and around 18k files. But had to stop as there were way too many features to develop and bugs to fix. Also, management does not see that ki…

You are probably aware, but for. others with ccache this is called "cache sloppiness", which is my favourite term.

You can set this via config, as by default ccache is paranoid about being correct. But you can tweak it with things like setting a build directory home (this is great for me, as I'm the only user but compile things in say `/home/josh/dev/foo` and `/home/josh/dev/bar` and have my build directory as my dev directory and it's shared. (see https://ccache.dev/manual/latest.html for all the wonderful knobs you can turn and tweak).

Fantastic tool, the compression with zstd is fantastic as well.

I played with distcc (as I have a "homelab" with a couple of higher end consumer desktops), but found it not worth my time as compiling locally was faster. I'm sure with much bigger code bases (like yours) this would be great. Reason I used it it that archlinux makes it super easy to use with makepkg (their build tool script that helps to build packages).

Re: Distcc: A fast, free distributed C/C++ compiler

#54

Post by tonetheman »

dspillett wrote: post #17

Back at Uni (two-and-a-half decades ago now), I setup a hacky version of this sort of thing to distribute compilations over several workstations: * use make -j to run multiple task at once * replace¹ gcc with a script that picked a host and ran the task on that² This had many limitations that distcc lists it doesn't have (the machines had to have the same everything installed, the input and output locations for gcc h…

[dead]

Re: Distcc: A fast, free distributed C/C++ compiler

#55

Post by Taywee »

nicce wrote: post #38
Erlangen wrote: post #14

Isn't it a misnomer to call it a "compiler"? Even it's github README says otherwise, > distcc is not itself a compiler, but rather a front-end to the GNU C/C++ compiler (gcc), or another compiler of your choice. All the regular gcc options and features work as normal.

I guess it depends. You use this software to convert your source code into the binary blobs efficiently. From high level, it behaves like a compiler, but internals are just using other compilers.

A lot of other compilers are the same way. gcc and g++ are higher level wrappers around their low level compiling and linking executables. It depends how you define the terms, including what you mean by "program".

Re: Distcc: A fast, free distributed C/C++ compiler

#56

Post by sluongng »

pjc50 wrote: post #15
ironbound wrote: post #7

Is there a reason to uses this over something like bazel build?

Is bazel build distributed? distcc lets you use a lot of machines to speed up the wallclock-time of your compilation.

Not only it's distributed like distcc, Bazel also provide sandboxing to ensure that environment factors does not affect the build/test results. This might not mean much for smaller use cases, but at scale with different compiler toolchains targeting different OS and CPU Architecture, the sandbox helps a ton in keeping your build result accurate so that it could be cached remotely (like using ccache).

On top of it, the APIs Bazel uses to communicate with the remote execution environment is standardized and adopted by other build tools with multiple server implementation to match it. Looking into https://github.com/bazelbuild/remote-apis/#clients, you could see big players are involved: Meta, Twitter, Chromium project, Bloomberg while there are commercial supports for some server implementations.

Finally, on top of C/C++, Bazel also supports these remote compilation / remote test execution for Go, Java, Rust, JS/TS etc... Which matters a lot for many enterprise users.

Disclaimer: I work for https://www.buildbuddy.io/ which provides one of the remote execution server implementation and I am a contributor to Bazel.

Re: Distcc: A fast, free distributed C/C++ compiler

#57

Post by z29LiTp5qUC30n »

donaldihunter wrote: post #43

25+ years ago, our company used Clearcase for version control and it's clearmake had distributed build capability. Clearcase used a multi version file system (MVFS) and had build auditing so clearmake knew exactly what versions of source files were used in each build step. It could distribute build requests to any machine that could render the same "view" of the FS. Even without distributed builds, clearmake could re…

Clearcase was utter crap. 6 hour code checkouts and 2 weeks to setup a new developer is a freaking joke. I literally did a conversion from Clearcase to git and reduced the setup time to 15 minutes and this is for a code base older than Clearcase is.

Not to mention the absolutely bad design for handling merge conflicts (punt to human if more than 1 person touched a file seriously???)

Re: Distcc: A fast, free distributed C/C++ compiler

#59

Post by mattst88 »

vkoskiv wrote: post #35
squarefoot wrote: post #27

Good memories! I had fun with distcc by compiling kernels across a few local machines back when desktops for mere mortals were dog slow, and it helped a lot. I never used it for cross compiling though, which is something that could help today when starting compilations from small embedded boards. Did anyone have success in a mixed environment, such as a small ARM board with native GCC plus one or more faster x86 mach…

Just tried this. I have a slow ARM laptop and a fast x86 desktop. The ARM laptop seems to detect the desktop as specified in the environment variable, but it doesn't accelerate compiling at all. The x86 box sits idle while the ARM laptop compiles. I have the aarch64 cross compiler installed on the desktop as well. Maybe I'm just bad at RTFM, but I can't seem to get it to work.

I don't have enough details to debug, but something I discovered just the other day might be helpful if you're building the kernel. For kernel builds, you have to specify CC= after `make`, not before. E.g. `make -jX CC="distcc alpha-unknown-linux-gnu-gcc"`.

Re: Distcc: A fast, free distributed C/C++ compiler

#60

Post by bluGill »

jchw wrote: post #45

Related: https://github.com/icecc/icecream - another option that does what distcc does, but aimed at a somewhat different use case. https://ccache.dev/ - a similar idea but provides caching of build outputs instead of distributing builds. You can use it together with distcc to achieve even better performance.

The maintainers of icecream and distcc have an understanding that we want to bring the two back together. It will probably never happen as nobody wants to do the work (and there may be some differences in how they work that are not resolvable)
Post reply on HN