on Fri Aug 22 2008, rtsweng-sw-AT-yahoo.com wrote:
That would make it possible to easily separate the compilation of boost classes (or at least their methods) from that of user-defined classes. No, unfortunately, it wouldn't, because you have to pull in the definitions to use the template class, what you want is precompiled headers.
This is not exactly true. I already use such an approach in my own developments. The idea is to use concepts to make sure that the right member functions are called inside a cpp file and therefore will be compiled and usable everywhere.That would mean pulling in all related implementation details... But only for one compilation unit (created with that purpose in mind). Other compilation units would only have access to template class definitions. For that matter, i personally use the .h extension for template class definitions and .hpp for template class method definitions (but that's only an example of what could be done).
Note that i agree that it would also bring a readability benefit to the source code.
Benoît
This sounds exactly like what I am trying to do, I already split the declarations into .h files and the definitions into .hpp. Can you give a brief example of using a single .cpp file for compilation? Is this done like MSVC stdafx files?
For what it's worth, the Boost convention is that all C++ filenames end in "pp". Those who follow the convention tend to use ".ipp" files for implementation headers. -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com