bazel-buildfarm VS sccache

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.

Use icecream or sccache. sccache supports distributed builds.

https://github.com/mozilla/sccache/blob/main/docs/Distribute...

Worth noting that the first commit in sccache git repository was in 2014 (https://github.com/mozilla/sccache/commit/115016e0a83b290dc2...). So I suppose that what "happened" happened waay back.

If you have lots of shared dependencies, maybe try sccache?

I'm going to set up sccache [0] to use it tomorrow. We use MSVC, so EFS is off the cards.

[0] https://github.com/mozilla/sccache/blob/main/docs/S3.md

I think the primary benefit of pre-built procmacros will be for build servers which don't use a persistent cache (like sccache), since they have to compile all dependencies every time. But IMO improved support for persistent caches would be a better investment compared to adding support for pre-built procmacros.

Checkout https://github.com/mozilla/sccache

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)

That being said a compilation cache, eg the de-facto standard for Rust: sccache (https://github.com/mozilla/sccache) will help to compile and store some of the build artifacts centralized - still for each crate version + build profile (RUSTFLAGS) combination.