Dealing with the huge number of Boost header files

Question

Is there a way to drastically reduce the number of header files needed for Boost?

Ideally, I'm asking the Boost folks to find a way to make their product smaller. But in the meantime, is there a way to include Boost, but not have several thousand header files to deal with?

Is there a C++ mechanism to "bundle" thousands of header files into a single "package" and just check that single file into source control?

I guess the problem here is source control Doing a diff, svn status and svn checkout is so slow with all these files to deal with.

Answer 1

Boost offers a tool called BCP. BCP allows you to extract subsets of Boost.

It can also analyze your source tree and extract only the Boost components that your source tree is using.

Answer 2

I'd recommend putting your third-party libraries in a separate repository. Boost is template heavy, so there is a pretty good reason for them not to bundle their headers. Trying to include bundled Boost headers would move your "wasted" time from version control into your build times. That doesn't really scale. I would refuse to use Boost if you tried to do that to my Boost headers.

Answer 3

ccache can be a life saver for speeding up preprocessor heavy compilations.