Re: [Boost-users] filesystem headers

On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 8:16 AM, John Femiani wrote:

I second that -- I am quite curious about how much overhead various headers/libraries impose when you include tham, and when you actually use them (which seems to be a lot more expensive on msvc). Quick compile-test-correct cycles are important to me. I don't know the best way to even measure this.

In my opinion it is pointless to measure compile times. Instead, headers should be designed in a way that allows user code to not "see" anything that is not strictly necessary to compile a particular user cpp file. Back to boost::filesystem, I see two problems: - It uses very few headers which makes it impossible to #include a small bit of it. - The path and wpath types are in fact typedefs of the basic_path template and this makes using incomplete path references rather clunky. One has to write: #include <string> namespace boost { namespace filesystem { template class basic_path; struct path_traits; typedef basic_pathstd::string,path_traits path; } } One solution is to put something like the above definitions in a separate boost header file but I would much prefer if I could simply say namespace boost { namespace filesystem { class path; } } in my headers. Emil Dotchevski Reverge Studios, Inc. http://www.revergestudios.com/reblog/index.php?n=ReCode