The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

Incredibuild

I've started playing around with a tool called IncrediBuild, from http://www.xoreax.com. It uses agents on multiple machines to do a distributed compile, which speeds things up pretty nicely. The UI is very polished and the software performs well in the few tests I've done. It only works with MSDev, but that's okay.

Has anyone else used IncrediBuild? I'd love to hear how other people have liked it. I'd also like to know if there are other, similar programs for distributed compilation. And I've heard that dmake on UNIX does a fine job of compiling in parallel on a single machine, with the idea being that I/O is the bottleneck for compilation so you don't need many machines so much as many processes on the same machine. Any comments?

Thanks in advance.

Eponymous
Monday, May 17, 2004

That's http://www.xoreax.com

You can't put a period at the end of a URL here.

Wayne
Monday, May 17, 2004

Thanks.

Eponymous
Monday, May 17, 2004

distcc [ http://distcc.samba.org/ ] is the Unix equivalent. It also works with ccache [ http://ccache.samba.org/ ] to provide even faster compilation, and both work beautifully with scons [ http://scons.sourceforge.net ] to provide a reliable, distributed and fast build environment.

Ori Berger
Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Yes - we use incredibuild and as long as your dependencies are set up correctly, it works well.

If you are only going to use one machine with dmake or distcc you might as well just use the parallel make feature of your current make system (presuming that it has one). It's -j in gnumake IIRC

r1ch
Tuesday, May 18, 2004

There is also jetbuild.

http://www.jetfrog.com/

We tried this because it supports Xbox, which Incredibuild doesn't (or maybe just didn't at the time). However we couldn't get it to work, and their support email seemed rather iffy. I have heard the same story from other people, too, but if it works for you it may be worth a go.

(I don't think it would take too long to write a home-grown distributed compilation system for VC++, but to make it practical (and easy :) you'd have to do preprocessing and linking on your own PC -- don't know whether you'd actually get a massive performance boost in that case, but you never know.)

Tom
Tuesday, May 18, 2004

Tom - Incredibuild had XBOX support added pretty recently, I think.

r1ch
Tuesday, May 18, 2004