Tim (pronounced 'team') has similar goals to those of Distcc and Icecream, except it aims to require no configuration from the user whatsoever. In fact, the architecture is very similar to that of the latter.

It takes full advantage of Erlang's concurrency features on the daemon and scheduler sides, while the compiler wrapper (tim) is written in C to introduce as little overhead as possible.

For now, the goal is to make it work in homogenous environments. In order words, it assumes the compilers installed on all hosts generate compatible object files.

Additionally, there's no support for different 'teams' (or subnetworks), which means that all hosts running timd (the local daemon) will be part of the 'team' and available for contributing to the build.

The job of the scheduler (tims) is to keep track of the host loads and distribute the jobs in a fair and intelligent way.