software development Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

, distcc is a tool for speeding up compilation of

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

by using

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

over a

computer network A computer network is a collection of communicating computers and other devices, such as printers and smart phones. In order to communicate, the computers and devices must be connected by wired media like copper cables, optical fibers, or b ...

. With the right configuration, distcc can dramatically reduce a project's compilation time. It is designed to work with the C programming language (and its derivatives like C++ and

Objective-C Objective-C is a high-level general-purpose, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style message passing (messaging) to the C programming language. Originally developed by Brad Cox and Tom Love in the early 1980s, it was ...

) and to use GCC as its backend, though it provides varying degrees of compatibility with the

Intel C++ Compiler Intel oneAPI DPC++/C++ Compiler and Intel C++ Compiler Classic (deprecated icc and icl is in Intel OneAPI HPC toolkit) are Intel’s C, C++, SYCL, and Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) compilers for Intel processor-based systems, available for Wind ...

and

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

' Sun Studio Compiler Suite. Distributed under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

, distcc is

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

Design

distcc is designed to speed up compilation by taking advantage of unused processing power on other computers. A machine with distcc installed can send code to be compiled across the network to a computer which has the distccd

daemon A demon is a malevolent supernatural being, evil spirit or fiend in religion, occultism, literature, fiction, mythology and folklore. Demon, daemon or dæmon may also refer to: Entertainment Fictional entities * Daemon (G.I. Joe), a character ...

and a compatible compiler installed. distcc works as an agent for the compiler. A distcc daemon has to run on each of the participating machines. The originating machine invokes a

preprocessor In computer science, a preprocessor (or precompiler) is a Computer program, program that processes its input data to produce output that is used as input in another program. The output is said to be a preprocessed form of the input data, which i ...

to handle header files, preprocessing directives (such as #ifdef) and the source files and sends the preprocessed source to other machines over the network via TCP either unencrypted or using SSH. Remote machines compile those source files without any local dependencies (such as libraries, header files or macro definitions) to object files and send them back to the originator for further compilation. distcc version 3 supports a mode (called ''pump mode'') in which included header files are sent to the remote machines, so that preprocessing is also distributed.

Related software

distcc was an option for distributed builds in versions of Apple's

Xcode Xcode is a suite of developer tools for building apps on Apple devices. It includes an integrated development environment (IDE) of the same name for macOS, used to develop software for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS. It w ...

development suite prior to 4.3, but has been removed.

Goma

Goma is a similar tool made by Google to replace distcc & ccache in compiling chromium.

Ccache

ccache is another tool aimed to reduce the compilation time by caching the output from the same input source files. ccache can also use distcc as its backend, providing distributed compiling if it is not already cached by using the CCACHE_PREFIX environment variable.

Icecream

icecream was created by SUSE based on distcc. Like distcc, icecream takes compile jobs from a build and distributes it among remote machines allowing a parallel build. But unlike distcc, icecream uses a central server that dynamically schedules the compile jobs to the fastest free server.

References

External links

* {{Official website, https://github.com/distcc
google distcc pump mode

DMUCS – a Distributed Multi-User Compilation System

DistCC Enterprise Load Balancer
Compiling tools Free computer programming tools Cross-platform software Unix programming tools