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Hello, Somebody here insists that all the program's definitions will be stored in one large header file that all C modules include, rather that keeping the declarations distributed among specific header files. That sounds pretty crappy to me - but how bad it is really? will it have a very negative impact on build time?
I think that's not true:
It takes skill & care to make something beautiful; I think it's far more likely that something which has been made with such skill & care will be stable than something that hasn't.
Or maybe it was about women...
A while ago I thought about putting up my own little poster:
"You're a thinker, not a doer"
Why?
One weekend a couple of years ago I though I'd save some money by buying a hedge trimmer and tidy the hedges around our garden myself.
Big mistake ... I managed to get a very numb arm from swinging the trimmer up high and down low for a long period.
So I went to the doctor, explained what I had done and he responded (without even looking at my arm):
"It's rubbing nerves. The trouble is that you haven't realised that you're a thinker and not a doer".
Really didn't know whether to take it as a compliment or an insult.
Anyway ... I don't think I'll try to save money in that way again.
Anyone want to buy a hedge trimmer? - It's only been used once!
Today, who cares if a build takes 3 or 5 seconds.
this is true. but it can make a lot of difference in a debugging session, that requires some fine tunning. I think the difference in build time, in a large project, will be much more than 2 seconds...
I have never seen more than 5 seconds for a ~48k project
Erik
Fine, but some products have dependencies other than pure C: header files might have to be parsed for other external tools for intermediate processing, and some products can consist of multiple components (i.e. binaries) that depend on one another...
and in either case you ca nuse one header file or multiple.
In my opinion one or mutiple header files is a matter of shop standards (hopefully not just personal preference), either has (dis)advantages. Either will work if properly implemented.
Either will work, but the big one means that any change to the header file will always force a full rebuild. If you have a couple of hundred source files, and are building with full optimization, you are likely to have to wait far longer than 5 seconds.