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 14:27:55

On Aug 2, 2012, at 1:43 PM, Andrey Semashev <andrey.semashev_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On Thursday 02 August 2012 00:50:26 Daniel Larimer wrote:
>> 
>> 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.
> 
> If you can create a slim equivalent of aligned_storage, I think we could 
> simply replace the current implementation.
> 

This really gets to the heart of the design of the boost libraries.  If it is possible to create a slim version of something like aligned_storage, it should also be possible to do so for many other libraries. 

It is a lot of work to create a 'slim' library, particularly if you don't have a collection of 'slim' libraries to build on top of.  Should it be a boost wide effort to migrate toward a two-layer API, slim vs fast?  

In my opinion a concerted effort needs to be made to make c++ compile faster when using standard libraries and boost.

Is it there anything particularly horrid about forward declaring sizes, using reinterpret cast, or other such techniques to hide implementation details and thereby improve compile times?   

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