I’m a incredibly proud to announce that as of now there is a version of distcc which works with Microsoft’s Visual C (and C++) Compiler cl. We’re calling this an alpha release and hoping that people will let us know if there’s anything they need fixed.

To get the alpha all you need to do is download it from svn://cdot.senecac.on.ca/distcc/branches/alpha01. Run ./configure, make, and make install. Remember that cygwin is a prerequisite.

After you have distcc installed (on your client(s) and server(s)) you need to start your daemons. Just run distccd—daemon—allow 1.2.3.4 (or whatever your client’s addresss is). Alternatively you can run distccd with an ip mask to allow multiple clients to connect: distccd—daemon—allow 192.168.0.0/24. This needs to be done on every daemon, or slave, box.

Finally you need to compile something! For distcc to know where the daemons are you need to export an enviornment variable called “DISTCC_CL_HOSTS” and give it the ip addresses of the hosts which can run MSVC jobs seperated by whitespace. When using msvc distcc does not consider the .distcc file at all. From the command line distcc is run like this:

distcc cl /c /Fofileone.obj file.c

Masquerade mode defaults to gcc settings and if you are using an executable name other than “cl” or “cl.exe” than distcc will default gcc. This is done to ensure that no functionality is lost for current users.

Please report any issues to distccbugs@foobartastic.com.

Cesar and I are now going to work on making sure that distcc with msvc works for Mozilla and porting unit tests to ensure that cl users have all the distcc functionality that gcc users do. For details on our plans check http://zenit.senecac.on.ca/wiki/index.php/Distcc_with_MSVC

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