gg VS zapcc

Another interesting option if you are feeling adventurous is using AWS lambda as your build executor.  I have no idea how feasible this is, however, the gg project from Stanford looks interesting.  It attempts to use AWS lambdas for running builds at the maximum possible parallelism.

This is very similar to https://github.com/StanfordSNR/gg by Keith Weinstein's group at Stanford. Cool stuff! Have always wondered why Keith's work hasnt made its way into large companies (besides I think Facebook? not sure)

Running it locally will always be faster as long as your machine is not a bottleneck (#cores, ram, ...). I think the use-case for distcc et al is to enable less-powerful machines to run builds faster by levering other machines. That’s exactly what we use it for at work. Our developers have not-so-powerful laptops and with distcc/icecc they can utilize the power of our build agents in the server room.

Also interesting to read: https://github.com/StanfordSNR/gg

C++ modules helps with the parsing problem similar to precompiled headers, but it doesn't help with the code execution at compile time problem. All your overload matching, free function lookup, SFINAE, concept matching, and consteval code needs executing and that can take very considerable time. Other than JITing all that stuff, and maybe running an in-memory server like https://github.com/yrnkrn/zapcc, I don't know what more can be done here.

If you use clang, that might be of interest: https://github.com/yrnkrn/zapcc