I've been using distcc for quicker distributed builds without issue for many years. What extra features does sccache bring to the table other than it being rewritten in Rust?
I won't repeat my entire comment from Reddit, but one other notable point is that tools like ccache/distcc don't generally support MSVC, and we build Firefox for Windows with MSVC, so that's pretty important to us. And frankly, our Windows builds are slow enough that we can use all the build time wins we can get.
That's true. ccache/distcc only supports GCC. Well, LLVM probably works as well since its flags are GCC compatible.
It's been very frustrating on multiple open source projects I've worked on, people proposing to change entire build systems of projects just so that MSVC can be included as a build target. I hope the new Bash-on-Windows stuff will eventually make supporting MSVC a little simpler from various Unix-oriented build tools.
It's worth it though. There are lots of people on Windows! And thankfully, most of the other pieces (like the build system) in Rust are cross platform by default. :-)
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5e654a/sccache_mozill...
If there's a sccache maintainer reading this thread please consider explaining the advantages of using sccache over distcc in the README.
The distcc readme says nothing of the sort? It seems to specify that it shares header files and compiles cpp files (which are all presumably sent back to the source as object files, which links them together)
It seems to work with ccache, but if you're spinning up fresh instances all the time ccache will need to be synchronized somehow, and it doesn't seem to drive that (whereas sccache seems to do so)
At that point, the requester could cache that output, should they want to.