Re: [boost] [forward_declare] Interest Inquiry toward Faster Compile Times

Subject: Re: [boost] [forward_declare] Interest Inquiry toward Faster Compile Times
From: Daniel Larimer (dlarimer_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-08-02 00:50:26

On Aug 1, 2012, at 11:20 PM, Andrey Semashev <andrey.semashev_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On Wednesday 01 August 2012 20:36:03 Daniel Larimer wrote:
>> 
>> One of the things I realized doing this work was that often the only reason
>> you need to include a header is because the compiler needs to know the SIZE
>> of the type that you wish to forward declare and nothing else.  So  our
>> development is slowed entirely due to the lack of a SINGLE NUMBER.   So I
>> created a utility that allowed me to 'forward declare' the size of the
>> variable.  This allowed me to use return by value and member variables via
>> forward declaration WITHOUT having to resort to heap allocation.
> 
> This is an interesting idea but you also have to know alignment of the 
> forwarded type. Which basically brings us to aligned_storage. I think, a 
> simple wrapper around aligned_storage like your fwd could be a useful tool.
> 
> 
Simply including boost::aligned_storage adds 1600 lines of code to be processed, most of it totally
irrelevant to the task of aligned storage.  I would want to implement aligned storage with much less overhead.

The primary goal is to accelerate compile times and including anything from boost::mpl (which alligned_storage does) starts to pile on the code.

Dan

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