on 23.03.2010 at 1:22 Josh Faust wrote :
i strongly diagree with you i think one should strive to make his library open to as many users as it is possible, not only pro developers [blah blah blah] A lot of professional developers (and corporations) refuse to use boost because of the increased compile times in client code. Focusing on people who are not comfortable linking against other libraries (a pretty fundamental part of C/C++ development) to me focuses on the entirely wrong set of developers.
[Boost.Thread vs. pthreads compilation example]
was that an argument? if so i say that separating declaration and implementation for non template code is a natural practice in C and C++ development i.e. declaration -- in headers (*.h), implementation -- in *.cpp or *.c personally i like the compile-once-link-any-time-you-want principle especially it fits well with msvc set of tools once you have a lib and the header you can put a file in your /include dir with the following contents //file "universe_formula" #include "path_to_actual_header/formula.h" #ifdef NDEBUG #pragma comment(lib, "universef.lib") #else #pragma comment(lib, "universefd.lib") #endif now if you #include <universe_formula> linker will be automatically informed about the package with symbols to resolve oh and i forgot that you need to put the .lib file(s) in your per project/global /lib dir -- Pavel