Distutils2 currently performs all build steps strictly sequentially. For compute-expensive steps, such as compiler invocations, it would be useful to perform builds in parallel - in particular, if the system has multiple CPUs. This project should create an infrastructure in distutils for parallel builds, and provide the user a way to integrate this feature into a larger build process (such as Python's build process itself). Students considering this project should familiarize themselves with the GNU make jobserver.
Bug report to track work on this: 5309