Readers please note that sccache isn't just for Rust, and isn't just caching!
It has a number of features, combining capabilities of ccache/distcc/icecream for C, C++ and Rust...along with some unique things that I've not seen in other tools. My comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25604249 has a summary.
icecream and ccache has been a killer combo for my development routine, even if I only connect my workstation with the laptop which I would otherwise almost never use.
distcc didn't for example handle the load balancing well in my experiments whereas icecream did much better on that front and thus resulting with noticeably shorter build times. icecream also comes with a nice GUI (icemon) which can come really handy, e.g. you can use it to observe the build jobs and debug when things go south.
But I didn't know that sccache also supports distributed builds. From your comment it seems as if this was a recentish addition. I wonder how polished it is but I will definitely give it a try at some moment.
Sounds like you invented your own Turbopack (by Vercel) [0], which basically does what you're talking about, it hosts a remote cache that parallel build servers can access, cutting down compile times by quite a lot.
Documentation is encouraging. I loved icecream when it was working but it had serious reliability problems. This looks worth trying as a replacement, thanks.
Note that sccache works slightly differently and has a different threshold for what is cacheable. I could never get it to match even 80% of ccache’s hit rate.
https://github.com/mozilla/sccache