SMP. Currently, there's no good way to distribute builds around an NT environment. Maybe with gcc, and as soon as the x86 optimizations get better. Unfortunately, msvc currently produces faster code. Effectively, the same rules apply for either SMP or distributed builds since they both involve multiple processes working on the same project.

There are two basic problems with msvc's default behavior that gets in the way of SMP builds. Writing debug info to a common database file, and automatic pre-compiled headers.

For debug builds, use -Z7 -Yd to put the debug information into the object files (then into the dll or exe). A separate .pdb file still gets generated at link time. So far, I haven't noticed any difference in debugging behavior doing things this way vs. the way dev studio projects want do it by default.

As for pre-compiled headers, generate them ahead of time with one source file that simply includes what you want in your pch (like stdafx.cpp for vc generated mfc projects) with -Yc and use -Yu with the rest of your files to use it. Set up the dependencies properly to avoid race conditions between the processes. You can use -Fp to place the precompiled header data in $(LOCATE_TARGET).

On Feb 13, 2004, at 12:11 AM, Alen Ladavac wrote: