[dahart]

I don't think you can use a different job server for make, all you can do is have a make rule that launches parallel or something else, but then you lose dependency tracking on the sub-tasks.

Are you running parallel make tasks where each task is also doing something multi-threaded or parallel? Like using make -j 8 won't work for you?

Make does have the -l load average task limiter when but I've never gotten it to work reliably, it always starts way too many jobs at first and chokes for a while before calming down. Often that won't work for me, but maybe it will help you?

[psi-squared]

My current workflow has a lot of "Run make -j<lots> to build, followed by parallel -j<lots> to run all the tests", but sometimes I want to compare/test multiple different versions of the code (in a way which, sadly, doesn't work well with incremental builds). In that case it'd be nice to be able to just spin everything up and not have to worry about overloading/under-loading the machine I'm working on.

I know what you mean about the load average limiter - parallel behaves like that too. I think the --delay option to parallel is supposed to solve that (I haven't tried it - will try tomorrow), but I don't know if make has anything similar.

Finally, on further reading, it definitely seems technically possible, even if it hasn't been done so far. The make documentation has a section on the jobserver protocol, which looks complete enough to write both the client and server parts: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Job-Slots...

So if nothing exists so far, it's something I might look into writing myself.

[dahart]

> Finally, on further reading, it definitely seems technically possible https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Job-Slots.... So if nothing exists so far, it's something I might look into writing myself.

Holy moly, that's kinda crazy, but would be fun, you should totally do it! Looking forward to your blog post! ;)