Is there any way to make Xcode 7.3 and above support distributed build among multi Mac devices?

Question

I'm in an iOS development team with about 10 mates. All of us are using the Mac devices in a 1Gbps lan so I'm wondering is there anyway we can distributed build the project:

1. When someone starts to build the project, it could auto connect to other Mac devices and distribute the compile unit. Just like distcc.
2. The parallel build job counts could beyond the host's cpu cores. For example it could compile more than N, maybe N * 2, files simultaneously on different clients even the host only has N cpu cores.

I've googled a lot of about this but all the articles seem to be out of date. Any solution for the latest Xcode 7.3?

Answer 1

Xcode previously had a "Distributed Build" feature before version 4.5, and was subsequently removed. The standard Apple way of doing such things nowadays is usually via "Continous Integration" (bots), which would normally be run from an Xcode Server environment. That's more than likely not what you're looking for, since it deviates quite a bit from the idea of simply having client computers on a network sharing a build task.

The good news is there is an active github project called DistCode - (Distributed Compilation For Xcode) that does use the former Apple component distcc, which does seem to work with the current version of Xcode (7.3.1 / Apple LLVM version 7.3.0 clang-703.0.31).

• https://github.com/marksatt/DistCode

• Xcode Server and Continuous Integration Guide