outrun VS bazel-buildfarm

While it's purpose is different it can be used to do distributed compiling, so I'll leave it here.

https://github.com/Overv/outrun

Since I was just going down this rabbit hole recently, I kind of wonder if it's possible to set the filesystem on something more like the BitTorrent protocol so things like the libraries/compilers/headers that are used during compilation dont all need to come from the main pc. It probably wouldn't be useful until you reached a stupid number of computers and you started reaching the limits of the Ethernet wire, but for something stupid that can run on a pi cluster it would be a fun project.

Your mention of compile heavy workloads reminded me of a project called Outrun, it offloads work to another machine. All it seems to require is Python, Fuse3 and ssh.

Awesome! This write up is satisfyingly detailed. Prior work in this space includes Plan9 of course, as well as the python project Outrun, which has it's own RPC-based FUSE FS: https://github.com/Overv/outrun

Other approachs to deployment in particular include the functional package managers Nix and Guix, which can create lightweight application images, and could probably be cobbled together into some sort of remote environment replication even across architectures. As I read on, I thought less about how this compares with Guix in regards to application/environment packaging and more about how these things could be glued together in interesting ways, because I think the intro leads in through slightly off-label examples, if that makes sense. Application packaging isn't what this addresses at the end of the day, but it's no less fascinating for it.

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.