Thread: How can g++ recognize *.hpp header files?

For one thing, you aren't supposed to compile header files. You should compile .cpp or .c files.

You shouldn't COMPILE header files, so although you are correct that it doesn't recognize them as source files, it shouldn't cause a problem - header files should be included in .c, .cpp, .C or .cxx files.

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Mats

It's certainly possible to precompile headers, but if the compiler supports it is another matter. I don't know.

Also I don't think file extensions are part of the C++ standard. I believe the C standard does define these, but not the C++ one. Someone correct if I'm wrong.

So you can't actually think of the hpp extension has non-standard. It is instead a convention that cpp is the extension to use for source files and hpp for header files, whereas c and h respectively are the ones used for C. You can still use these two for C++ projects, but its just not conventioned that way.

Yes, you can precompile your header, and to make the compiler realize that what the file is, use the option "-x c++-header".

Note however that there are several conditions that have to be applied, the most important one is that one compilation unit (source file) can't have more than one precompiled header.

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Mats

You provide little information. The warning message you are getting can happen for several reasons, one of them the fact you are providing linker switches in your command line but actually not attempting any linking, like in the common mistake of using the -c switch which instructs the compiler not to link.

First start here: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4....d-Headers.html

Then if you can't get it to work tells us what you are doing and the error you are getting.

Boost compilation times often stem from template logic, not the time needed to parse the headers. Precompiled headers can't improve that.

And of course, precompiled headers don't improve runtime performance.

Unless you're including a very big set of headers, such as Windows.h. Then PCH improves compile time significantly.

It is unlikely that precompiled headers is going to vastly reduce your compile time unless you have a HUGE project with LOTS of header files that all get included into lots of files.

Precompiled headers work best on machines where the header files themselves take a long time to access, such as network mounted file-systems. If the files you are using are "local", then you probably won't see much difference.

If you have a machine with multiple processor(core)s, then using "make -j N" where N is about 1.5-3x the number of cores. On a single processor machine, "make -j 2" may make it a bit faster - there's no better way to find out than to try. "make -j N" will run N simultaneous compile jobs, which helps the overall compile time. It obviously won't actually help much if there is only one or two source files that are huge, but for many C++ projects, there are many small source files, and here it can really help quite a bit to get multiple compiles going at the same time.

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Mats

Using PCH for Windows.h saves lots of time when you have a lot of source files that needs Windows.h. That's the beauty of the them.

Projects using external libraries, especially when those library headers are big and complex, make good targets.
Meanwhile, pre-compiled headers only increase compilations times. Not linking, and definitely not run-time speeds.