Best Build Automation Tools for C++

Incredibuild is the leading platform for development acceleration. Our platform speeds up developer and CI builds with our distribution and caching technologies, cutting down wait times from hours and days to minutes. Most importantly, we do so without changing your code, tools, or processes, on prem or on the cloud. Incredibuild gives you better visibility into your builds, significant acceleration, and smarter build asset orchestration for 8-10x faster builds. Incredibuild is used by over 200,000 developers and managers in more than 2,000 companies, including top brands like Microsoft, Amazon and Citibank, Adobe and Disney, Intel, Samsung and EPIC Games, Nintendo, among others. This allows them to turbocharge their development and delight their customers.

Bazel is a versatile open-source tool for building and testing software across multiple languages and platforms, designed to ensure rapid, incremental builds by only recompiling necessary components while utilizing advanced local and remote caching, thorough dependency analysis, and parallel execution strategies. It seamlessly accommodates a range of programming languages, including Java, C++, Go, Android, and iOS, enabling projects to scale efficiently from small repositories to extensive monorepos and intricate Continuous Integration setups. The tool's declarative extension language allows teams to tailor or enhance rules for various languages and platforms, fostering collaboration within its expanding community ecosystem. Additionally, Bazel provides robust query features for examining and comprehending dependency graphs, alongside extensive versioned documentation and release notes, and strong support options through GitHub, Slack, and regular community updates. Industry giants such as Google, Stripe, and Dropbox rely on Bazel to develop critical infrastructure and applications, emphasizing its significance in the software development landscape. As Bazel continues to evolve, its user base is likely to grow, reflecting its importance in modern software engineering practices.

Distcc is a system designed for distributed compilation that speeds up the build process for C, C++, Objective-C, and Fortran by distributing compile tasks across various networked machines. This tool works effectively with both GCC and Clang toolchains, seamlessly intercepting compiler commands and redistributing them to remote daemons while maintaining optimization settings, include directories, and tracking of dependencies. The architecture is client-server based, featuring a lightweight listener that oversees job queues, prioritizes local compilation as necessary, and easily identifies available hosts through straightforward configuration or DNS. Additionally, Distcc accommodates cross-compilation setups, offers SSH tunneling for secure clusters, allows for the blacklisting of unreliable servers, and integrates well with modern build systems such as Make, CMake, and Ninja. It also includes monitoring tools that supply real-time data on job distribution and performance, and its compatibility with compilation databases (compdb) permits detailed management of distributed workloads. Overall, Distcc is a powerful solution that significantly enhances build efficiency across diverse development environments.