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I am working on a large C++ project in Visual Studio 2008, and there are a lot of files with unnecessary #include directives. Sometimes the #includes are just artifacts and everything will compile fine with them removed, and in other cases classes could be forward declared and the #include could be moved to the .cpp file. Are there any good tools for detecting both of these cases?
While it won’t reveal unneeded include files, Visual studio has a setting
/showIncludes(right click on a.cppfile,Properties->C/C++->Advanced) that will output a tree of all included files at compile time. This can help in identifying files that shouldn’t need to be included.You can also take a look at the pimpl idiom to let you get away with fewer header file dependencies to make it easier to see the cruft that you can remove.