Ten years ago, I wrote my own C++ software framework and it was probably one of the best moves in my career as a software developer. It has been immensely useful for every little project I have done ever since, but adding bits and pieces and modifying it down the road has made the software quality slowly degrade.

I’m half-way through a rewrite, not from scratch but a pretty serious overhaul. One thing I’ve spent a lot of time on is reducing header file dependencies to improve compile times. It is one of those strangely satisfying things that you can never really motivate to spend time on while in production. So far I’ve managed to cut the compile time in half (from 17 seconds for a full rebuild down to 9, so it really wasn’t that bad before either), mostly by eliminating system headers.

A very accessible tool for this is actually GCC. Just add the -H flag and it will print out a hierarchical header dependency graph, including system headers. Using this I found out that the system header, required for standard placement new operator included over 50 system headers. I could get rid of it thanks to a tip I got on twitter, by just declaring my own placement new operator like this:

enum TMemType { MEMTYPE_DUMMY };
inline void* operator new(size_t, TMemType, void* ptr) { return ptr; }
#define T_PNEW(PTR) new(MEMTYPE_DUMMY, PTR)

Then I just use T_PNEW instead of new in all of my templated containers.

I’ve also moved over to private implementation as a standard practice. It’s a bit clunky and requires an extra pointer dereference for every call, but it reduces dependencies a lot. Most of my headers now only include the “tconfig.h” with standard types, and sometimes containers. The only place I found this extra dereference to be unacceptable was the mutex, but I also didn’t want to include system headers in my own headers, so the ugly but functional compromise I settled on was to reserve memory using a char mMutexStorage[T_MUTEX_SIZE] in the header and then do a placement new in the implementation file. The value of T_MUTEX_SIZE will be platform dependent, but can easily be compared to the actual mutex size at runtime to avoid memory corruption.

Finally, I must mention something that took me a long time as a developer to realize – return types can be forward declared even when returned by value. It makes sense if you know how they are passed on the stack, but I somehow always just assumed the compiler needed to know the size for it unless it was pointer or reference. It was maybe five years ago I learned this and all compilers I came across since then accept forward declaration for return types. That makes a huge difference, because you can do this:

class TString getSomeInformation();

or

class TVec3 getWorldPosition();

Or any type you like, without including the actual header for it. This means you can get away with pretty much zero includes as long as the implementation is private without compromising your API. I’m pretty sure this works for parameters as well, but since they are usually passed as const references anyway (mine are at least) it’s not such a big deal.

The only exception I found was MSVC, that does not allow this for cast operators, but luckily it can be bypassed by forward declaring outside the class instead of inlining it in the method declaration.

Speaking of forward declarations, this is also why I don’t use namespaces. I always make inline forward declarations like the ones above, never at the top. It would have been so convenient to make inline forward declarations of namespace members, like this:

class mylib::math::Vec3 getWorldPosition();

But there is no such thing and I hate those clunky forward namespace declarations at the top of the header, so I’ll stick with prefixes for now.