🚀 go-pugleaf

[cc'd to poster]


With <4gqe8u$pn7@solutions.solon.com>,
it seems Pieter Hintjens (pahint@eunet.be) sez:

+ I am building the ultimate Universal Header File.  :-)
+ This is a tool to make cross-platform programming in C
+ easier.  Basically, all 'common' header files are put
+ in the uUHF, instead of in each program.  By 'common',
+ I mean: all ANSI C header files, plus file i/o, socket
+ i/o, and anything else that is useful.

[snip 350-line header]

I did something similar on a smaller scale.  Compilation of even
the small programs took forever.  I went back and commented out
the #include statements which I knew weren't being used.  The
speedup was *significant*, and I say that running Digital Unix on
a DEC Alpha 4000.

What I had been seeing -- but not reading -- for years finally
sank in after that experience:  more often than not, the most
expensive (timewise) step in compilation is processing of header
files.  What you have in mind may be great for those platforms
which support preprocessed header files, with the result of the
preprocessing being stored in some intermediate state in a local
directory with the rest of the source, but for typical platforms
which process the same file again and again -- sorry, but I'd
hate to use anything that massive.

Just my two timeslices.


Luck++;
Phil

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