XCRemoteCache
Bartosz Polaczyk (Hacker News):
We are excited to be open sourcing XCRemoteCache, the library we created to mitigate long local builds. As the name suggests, this library is a remote caching implementation for iOS projects with an aim to reuse Xcode target artifacts generated on Continuous Integration (CI) machines. It supports Objective-C, Swift, and ObjC+Swift targets and can be easily integrated with existing Xcode projects, including ones managed by CocoaPods or Carthage.
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A remote cache is a popular technique to speed up builds of big applications by applying the “compile once, use everywhere” approach. As long as all input files and compilation parameters are the same, instead of building a target locally, one can download artifacts that were built and shared from some other machine. A key success factor for remote caching is finding an optimal caching level. Caching units that are too granular, where every single piece of the compilation step is cacheable, may lead to extensive network traffic overhead, which can offset CPU savings. On the other hand, putting the entire codebase into a single cacheable unit may significantly degrade the caching hit rate; every single local change invalidates remotely available cache artifacts, triggering a full build, locally.
The main Spotify iOS application is highly modularized and contains more than 400 independent modules configured as separate Xcode targets. Applying target-level caching was natural, and as we found out later, the right decision.
Previously:
