Programmers often whine that if only they had a faster/more memory/more cores machine they would be much happier (they never say more productive).
Can anyone think of a programming benift for whatever language/protocol system of having two idle quad quad core servers available in addition to the programmers workstation.
I can’t because most compilers/interpreters are often single treaded per say and follow a compile/check syntax phase then a link/binding sequence. And no ability to farm the compile phase, where many source files are compiled, exists even in modern IDEs.
distcc: a fast, free distributed C/C++ compiler. Systems really do build much faster.
Now you could as well run distributed build tools on your developers machines, as they are unlikely to be building at the same time.. but well having dedicated build clusters is way cooler.
It also makes practical daily automated builds and’ll help you score highly on the Joel Test.