I recently had cause to work with some Visual Studio C++ projects with the usual Debug and Release configurations, but also ‘Release All’ and ‘Debug All’, which I had never seen before.
It turns out the author of the projects has a single ALL.cpp which #includes all other .cpp files. The *All configurations just build this one ALL.cpp file. It is of course excluded from the regular configurations, and regular configurations don’t build ALL.cpp
I just wondered if this was a common practice? What benefits does it bring? (My first reaction was that it smelled bad.)
What kinds of pitfalls are you likely to encounter with this? One I can think of is if you have anonymous namespaces in your .cpps, they’re no longer ‘private’ to that cpp but now visible in other cpps as well?
All the projects build DLLs, so having data in anonymous namespaces wouldn’t be a good idea, right? But functions would be OK?
It’s referred to by some (and google-able) as a ‘Unity Build’. It links insanely fast and compiles reasonably quickly as well. It’s great for builds you don’t need to iterate on, like a release build from a central server, but it isn’t necessarily for incremental building.
And it’s a PITA to maintain.
EDIT: here’s the first google link for more info: http://buffered.io/posts/the-magic-of-unity-builds/
The thing that makes it fast is that the compiler only needs to read in everything once, compile out, then link, rather than doing that for every .cpp file.
Bruce Dawson has a much better write up about this on his blog: http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/03/22/make-vc-compiles-fast-through-parallel-compilation/