Re: [Boost-users] Boost and C++ "physical design"

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] Boost and C++ "physical design"
From: Václav Haisman (v.haisman_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-03-20 06:25:07

Yang Zhang wrote, On 20.3.2009 10:20:
> I have a couple questions about Boost and its implications for the
> "physical design" of C++ projects.
> 
> I'm guessing there probably aren't that many non-member, non-template
> functions in the Boost library, but of the ones that exist, are these
> usually labeled `static`, since boost is mostly a header library?
I think they are mostly marked inline rather than static.

> 
> Is there any advice on taming (1) the generated code size and/or (2) the
What do you want to tame here? Sizes of executables are IME not a problem,
unless you are on severally constrained embedded platform. Few megabytes of
executable are usually insignificant compared to huge data sets that acompany
it.

> build times* which result from using a header-mostly library like Boost?
>  A large C++ project consists of many translation units (.o files) which
> are generated from source files that include many of the same Boost
> headers over and over again.  (2) can be ameliorated with a distributed
> build process, but the more general issue here is that of consumption of
> compute resources, be it time or machines.
Any decent compiler supports precompiled headers. Those help quite
significantly with compilation time of source that uses Boost, IME.

--
VH