Re: [Fresco-devel] Suggested addition to Coding Style-guide

I didn't think this was going to be so controversial!

Stefanus Du Toit wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 13, 2003 at 01:14:53AM +0200, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:

> > When build times is really an issue, I believe using that using
> > things like precompiled headers helps much more than declaring by
> > hand which entity one uses.  At least, that is my exprience with
> > large projects.
> 
> Using a compiler cache should also all but completely eliminate this
> particular issue.

Surely that depends on what parameters it indexes upon? That's not to
say it wouldn't help :)

> I didn't realise that "regular" gcc supports precompiled headers these
> days. Since when is that the case?

AFAIKnew this was just a branch somewhere, not mainstream...I'd be
interested if its not :)

> > A frightening downside of forward declaring "by hand" is the same as
> > why you don't want code-duplication: Every minor change needs to be
> > done at zillions of places, whereas including a forward declaration
> > header keeps the changes in one place.
> 
> I think this is a reasonable point. A decent place to draw the line
> for Fresco may be one file per directory, since for the most part
> things are fairly well compartmentalized.

Of course this is parallel to iosfwd, which I thought the main reason
for using was since there was the issue with templates and typedef's,
not for the code-duplication reason above. I didn't consider 'class foo'
to be much duplication.

That would work quite well; perhaps having a fwd_decl.hh file in each
dir?

OTOH if you change that file, you end up recompiling everything that
includes it, for whatever feature it includes it for. But perhaps a
compiler cache solves this.

I'm not so bothered what we do, as long as we have a policy/standing on
it, so I know what to do.

Thanks for the input,

-- 
Neil