Thread: Trying to make the best use of header files

Generally, trying to include only the header files that contain declarations/definitions for what you actually need in your code is best practice, I believe. This also reduces compile time when you get larger projects, as long as you are using a makefile or some such. It will only compile the files that have been modified.

Knowing a bit more about your program and how you are structuring it might help people with giving you some advice.

Originally Posted by alanb

OK, so I gather that global header files should be used judiciously and preferrably only semi-globally.

Definitely.

Say, I want to build a world. I have one file for starting and getting a window, one for initialising the graphics system, one for rendering - which has everything from model definitions to projection (may eventually break this into two), and one for movement which has everything from keyboard input to physics calculations (may also break this one up in the future).

That sounds like a reasonable breakup. If you can describe what the file does in one word, such as input.cpp, then you're probably okay.

Once you start getting a lot of code, you might even want to break up your code into different subdirectories; graphics/, gui/, network/, etc. Then you can put code in each directory into a namespace of the same name. But you shouldn't have to worry about that for a while.