/Y3 where have you been all my life

I was just flicking through some of the entries over on Games from Within and I came across an entry on precompiled headers which is a good introduction of the pros and cons of using precompiled headers in a cross…

They certainly can. And with Visual C++ 7.1, which we’re using at work, you can quite easily get large precompiled headers when using a lot of templates and especially template metaprogramming in the header files used in the precompiled header.

For one of our projects that uses a lot of template metaprogramming using Boost.MPL we had a precompiled header file size of around 200 MB. Not only did build times get longer quite a bit, but also compiler memory usage increased dramatically. Large precompiled header files can also trigger the error “C1204 compiler limit: internal structure overflow” in VC 7.1. However, Microsoft ascertains us that this is fixed in VC 8.0. After reducing the number of precompiled headers used, build times went back to normal and the compiler errors disappeared.

Of course, templates generally cause longer build times by themselves – especially with a lot of dependent template instantiations. But in the case of this particular project, precompiled headers didn’t reduce but rather increased build times.

Cabeceras precompiladas multiplataforma

The Care and Feeding of Pre-Compiled Headers

A badly structured C++ codebase is likely to be as fatal as the cold, Russian winter was to Napoleon’s army. [Games from Within] Another installment of a very valuable series on physical design of large-scale C++ projects.    (first and…