They made a few interesting decisions:

1. Rather than installing every SDK on everyone's computer, they just send the compiler along with the sources to compile

2. They use something that sounded like a regex search to find the #includes, and package all these headers up with the file to be compiled. This ended up not working very well because they're not actually running a full preprocessor, so they can't handle things like #ifdefs. (For comparison, distcc runs the preprocessor locally)

2/3

@rattenhirn replacing cl.exe is certainly an interesting way to do it! Does Visual Studio not have a way of saying “use a different compiler instead of the default one”? (It must - the console SDKs can’t take the same approach of replacing the built-in compilers)

I’m not that familiar with Visual Studio’s build infrastructure.