bazel-buildfarm VS icecream

It can be. By default it is local.

But it has protobufs interfaces (IIRC), so a distributed build farm would generate the grpc endpoints for their implementation and then you tell bazel on the command line (or via .bazelrc) the address of the build farm it can use.

There's a couple of projects that implement the distributed/grpc part, the main one is https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-buildfarm

Not sure what to say concerning buildfarm's remote execution.

Reading an issue I've opened 1y ago [1], seems the backend requires the client to have a specific gcc version.

That's a strong limitation imho.

[1] https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-buildfarm/issues/545

You can also set up a remote build service that uses the same environment you run the containers in using something like https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel-buildfarm

Currently migrating to Bazel + bazel remote execution via Bazel buildfarm. Bazel has native support for build clusters.

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.

Of course! The github readme provides a lot of info - https://github.com/icecc/icecream

If you like distcc, did you ever give icecc a try?

https://github.com/icecc/icecream

I never had the time to set it up properly, but by the looks of it, it should be even better.

I would like to have a icecc setup I can vpn into. It seems that with normal configs the clients can talk to the scheduler, but the scheduler cant connect to the clients as it tries to connect to the device running the openvpn server not the one behind it. How could I make my openvpn clients appear almost as physical devices on the network, with unique IP's that local devices can connect to; or if that is unnecessary how could I solve this?

Glad to see a new release on this! I've read worrying news about the state of icecc, and the followup uncertain news on sccache, so I hope at least some part of the tooling is in a good shape.

I always wanted to try to use cmake-conan so I could let Conan grab all packages but have a neat cmake script being in charge of what gets built when. Also, this would allow me to easily switch between CMake fetchcontent and Conan packages that may or may not be stashed automatically on a local Artifactory server. Secondly, since now all build requirements are stashed on a server and binary reproducible, you could concider adding icecream and ccache into the mix. (Try running a node one of your buildservers for massive speadups with icecream) This however does require a reproducible build environment (by configure script) which conan again is really good in.