Compile farm

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A compile farm is a collection of one or more servers which have been set up to compile computer programs remotely for various reasons. Uses of a compile farm include:

  • Cross-platform development: When writing software that runs on multiple processor architectures and operating systems, it can be infeasible for each developer to have their own machine for each architecture - for example, one platform might have an expensive or obscure type of CPU. In this scenario, a compile farm is useful as a tool for developers to build and test their software on a shared server running the target OS and CPU. Compile farms may be preferable to cross-compilation as cross compilers are often complicated to configure, and in some cases compilation is only possible on the target, making cross-compilation impossible.
  • Cross-platform continuous integration testing: under this scenario, each server has a different processor architecture or runs a different operating system; scripts automatically build the latest version of a source tree from a version control repository. One of the difficulties of cross-platform development is that a programmer may unintentionally introduce an error that causes the software to stop functioning on a different CPU/OS platform from the one they are using. By using a cross-platform compile farm, such errors can be identified and fixed.
  • Distributed compilation: Building software packages typically requires operations that can be run in parallel (for example, compiling individual source code files). By using a compile farm, these operations can be run in parallel on separate machines. An example of a program which can be used to do this is distcc.

One example of a compile farm was the service provided by SourceForge until 2006. The SourceForge compile farm was composed of twelve machines of various computer architectures running a variety of operating systems, and was intended to allow developers to test and use their programs on a variety of platforms before releasing them to the public. It became non-operational some time in 2006, and was officially discontinued[1] on February 8, 2007.

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