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Asked: 2026-05-14T14:50:23+00:00

I heard some people complaining about including the windows header file in a C++

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I heard some people complaining about including the windows header file in a C++ application and using it. They mentioned that it is inefficient. Is this just some urban legend or are there really some real hard facts behind it? In other words, if you believe it is efficient or inefficient please explain how this can be with facts.

I am no C++ Windows programmer guru. It would really be appreciated to have detailed explanations.

*Edit: I want to know at compile time and execution. Sorry for not mentioning it.

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  1. Editorial Team

    If you precompile it, then the compilation speed difference is barely noticeable. The downside to precompiling, is that you can only have one pre-compiled header per project, so people tend to make a single “precompiled.h” (or “stdafx.h”) and include windows.h, boost, stl and everything else they need in there. Of course, that means you end up including windows.h stuff in every .cpp file, not just the ones that need it. That can be a problem in cross-platform applications, but you can get around that by doing all your win32-specific stuff in a static library (that has windows.h pre-compiled) and linking to that in your main executable.

    At runtime, the stuff in windows.h is about as bare-metal as you can get in Windows. So there’s really no “inefficiencies” in that respect.

    I would say that most people doing serious Windows GUI stuff would be using a 3rd-party library (Qt, wxWidgets, MFC, etc) which is typically layered on top of the Win32 stuff defined in windows.h (for the most part), so as I said, on Windows, the stuff in windows.h is basically the bare metal.

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