Distributed compiler for Microsoft Visual C++.

BuildPal is a tool for speeding up large C/C++ project build by distributing compilation to other machines on the network.

The existing open-source distributed compilers have some, if not all, of the following limitations.

• No Windows support.

  Pretty much all open-source distributed compilers are designed for *NIX systems, usually targetting GCC.

• No precompiled header support.

  It is difficult to reduce project build time if you have to forfeit the best single-machine optimization.

• Sub-optimal task distribution algorithms.

  Task distribution is usually round-robin, possibly weighted by a number of parallel jobs a machine can perform. This does not necessarily work well with a farm containing slaves with heterogeneous performance characteristics.

• Slow task propeller.

  Pushing tasks from the client machine to the farm must be as fast as possible. The speed of the leader is the speed of the gang.

BuildPal tries to overcome all of the mentioned limitations.

• Easy setup

  No additional files, other than BuildPal Server, are needed on the slave machines. All required files are automatically transferred on-demand.

• Non-intrusive

  BuildPal does not require any changes to the projects build system or project files.

• Node auto-detection

  Build nodes on LAN are automatically detected and used.

• Build Consistency

  BuildPal takes care to produce object files which are equivalent to the files which would be produced on local compilation.

• Remote preprocessing

  BuildPal does not preprocess headers on the local machine. Headers used by a source file are collected and transfered to the slave. These headers will be reused by the slave machines for subsequent compilations.

• PCH support

  BuildPal supports precompiled headers. Precompiled headers are created locally, on the client machine and are transferred to slave machines as needed.

• Self-balancing

  BuildPal tries to balance the work between the nodes appropriately by keeping track of their statistics, giving more work to faster machines. Additionally, if a node runs out of work, it may decide to help out a slower node.

At the moment, the only supported compiler toolset is MS Visual C++ compiler.

This includes:

Visual C++ 2008 (9.0)
Visual C++ 2010 (10.0)
Visual C++ 2012 (11.0)
Visual C++ 2013 (12.0)

For more information read the docs.