At sufficient speed too. A build on our build farm takes 2 hours, my local mac does it in 50 minutes.
Am I reading this right that a build farm is slower than your local development computer? Shouldn't that launch a re-evaluation of the build farm?
Not just builds but running tests as well. Actually I think I've heard that Google does exactly that (and caches compilation results, so they could just return them if they are ready).
Google's build and test execution infrastructure is both huge in size and absolutely amazing. One of the biggest positive surprises for me when I had my technical onboarding period.
I think the bottleneck there is actually memory. When building LLVM I run out of system memory before I run out of cores.
In a lot of C++ game development this is a huge factor for productivity, especially since a lot of translation units may need to be touched when changing APIs. Being able to utilize an entire idle office for each .cpp file can make a big difference in build times.
Most places doing any non-trivial C++ development will have a centralized distcc and ccache cluster, surely?
Most C++ shops I've worked at use MSVC and Incredibuild, so yes! I think MSVC is the norm in game development, especially for PC games, but I could be wrong on that.