distcc/distcc

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2302 stars · 316 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

distcc is a distributed compilation front-end for C, C++, and Objective C that spreads compile jobs across machines on a network. It works with gcc and GNU make's parallel builds, requires no shared filesystem, and can be significantly faster than local compilation.

Use cases

• speed up compiling large C/C++ projects across multiple machines
• distribute Linux kernel builds over a network
• reduce build times for projects like KDE or Samba using spare machines
• set up a distributed build farm without shared filesystems
• accelerate CI builds with parallel remote compilation
• use pump mode to offload preprocessing to remote servers

When to choose

• you build large C/C++/Objective C codebases and have multiple networked machines available
• you want faster builds without requiring shared filesystems or identical machine setups
• you already use GNU make -j and gcc-compatible toolchains

When to avoid

• your project is not C, C++, or Objective C
• you have only a single machine or a very fast local build
• you need distributed builds for languages with their own native distributed build tools
• network bandwidth between machines is very limited and pump mode is not viable

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

compiler build-tool developer-tools developer-tools performance cross-platform cli distributed-compilation c cpp gcc parallel-builds build-acceleration command-line linux macos

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