I have a very large codebase (read: thousands of modules) that has code shared across numerous projects that all run on different operating systems with different C++ compilers. Needless to say, maintaining the build process can be quite a chore.
There are several places in the codebase where it would clean up the code substantially if only there were a way to make the pre-processor ignore certain #includes if the file didn’t exist in the current folder. Does anyone know a way to achieve that?
Presently, we use an #ifdef around the #include in the shared file, with a second project-specific file that #defines whether or not the #include exists in the project. This works, but it’s ugly. People often forget to properly update the definitions when they add or remove files from the project. I’ve contemplated writing a pre-build tool to keep this file up to date, but if there’s a platform-independent way to do this with the preprocessor I’d much rather do it that way instead. Any ideas?
Generally this is done by using a script that tries running the preprocessor on an attempt at including the file. Depending on if the preprocessor returns an error, the script updates a generated .h file with an appropriate #define (or #undef). In bash, the script might look vaguely like this:
A pretty thorough framework for portably working with portability checks like this (as well as thousands others) is autoconf.