Re: [boost] "boost cold shoulder" (was proposal for #pragma oncesupport)

Subject: Re: [boost] "boost cold shoulder" (was proposal for #pragma oncesupport)
From: Zachary Turner (divisortheory_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-06-10 11:59:47

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 10:44 AM, Christopher Jefferson <
chris_at_[hidden]> wrote:

>
> On 10 Jun 2009, at 16:39, Sid Sacek wrote:
>
>  John and Pete,
>>
>> I do appreciate your insights into the inner workings of the Boost
>> community.  I'm not discouraged about the lack of interest in my
>> suggestion, but I was somewhat surprised.  Boost libraries are one of
>> those things that make life better for programming engineers.  I
>> believed that was the unwritten philosophy behind Boost, to "Make Life
>> Better."  Extending that philosophical notion, the Boost libraries would
>> also know about the shortcomings of compilers and operating systems and
>> help to improve their performance as well, simply because it "makes life
>> better."
>>
>> I suppose I must have been mistaken about that... perhaps not everybody
>> in the Boost community has feelings of magnanimity and charity.
>>
>>
> The big problem I have is that there is no evidence that #pragma once would
> actually help in practice. It helps in some super-special case, involving
> 200 basically empty files that all include each other and nothing else. I
> suspect (without any evidence) that if someone came along and said "I added
> #pragma once to the boost headers, and it sped up compilation by X% on
> windows, and didn't slow things down on linux / mac os x, and it didn't
> break any test or library", they might well get a less luke-warm response.
>
> Chris

FWIW I also mentioned in the original thread that adding pragma once to
every header file in a commercial application that I work on sped up the
build by 25%.  That being said, I do agree we should test it in the boost
libraries themselves, which is the first thing on my list of to-do's once I
have time.