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Asked: 2026-05-13T23:06:11+00:00

Why when I watch the build output from a VC++ project in VS do

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Why when I watch the build output from a VC++ project in VS do I see:

1>Compiling…
1>a.cpp
1>b.cpp
1>c.cpp
1>d.cpp
1>e.cpp
[etc…]
1>Generating code…
1>x.cpp
1>y.cpp
[etc…]

The output looks as though several compilation units are being handled before any code is generated. Is this really going on? I’m trying to improve build times, and by using pre-compiled headers, I’ve gotten great speedups for each “.cpp” file, but there is a relatively long pause during the “Generating Code…” message. I do not have “Whole Program Optimization” nor “Link Time Code Generation” turned on. If this is the case, then why? Why doesn’t VC++ compile each “.cpp” individually (which would include the code generation phase)? If this isn’t just an illusion of the output, is there cross-compilation-unit optimization potentially going on here? There don’t appear to be any compiler options to control that behavior (I know about WPO and LTCG, as mentioned above).

EDIT:
The build log just shows the “.obj” files in the output directory, one per line. There is no indication of “Compiling…” vs. “Generating code…” steps.

EDIT:
I have confirmed that this behavior has nothing to do with the “maximum number of parallel project builds” setting in Tools -> Options -> Projects and Solutions -> Build and Run. Nor is it related to the MSBuild project build output verbosity setting. Indeed if I cancel the build before the “Generating code…” step, none of the “.obj” files will exist for the most recent set of “compiled” files. This implies that the compiler truly is handling multiple translation units together. Why is this?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Compiler architecture

    The compiler is not generating code from the source directly, it first compiles it into an intermediate form (see compiler front-end) and then generates the code from the intermediate form, including any optimizations (see compiler back-end).

    Visual Studio compiler process spawning

    In a Visual Studio build compiler process (cl.exe) is executed to compile multiple source files sharing the same command line options in one command. The compiler first performs "compilation" sequentially for each file (this is most likely front-end), but "Generating code" (probably back-end) is done together for all files once compilation is done with them.

    You can confirm this by watching cl.exe with Process Explorer.

    Why code generation for multiple files at once

    My guess is Code generation being done for multiple files at once is done to make the build process faster, as it includes some things which can be done only once for multiple sources, like instantiating templates – it has no use to instantiate them multiple times, as all instances but one would be discarded anyway.

    Whole program optimization

    In theory it would be possible to perform some cross-compilation-unit optimization as well at this point, but it is not done – no such optimizations are ever done unless enabled with /LTCG, and with LTCG the whole Code generation is done for the whole program at once (hence the Whole Program Optimization name).

    Note: it seems as if WPO is done by linker, as it produces exe from obj files, but this a kind of illusion – the obj files are not real object files, they contain the intermediate representation, and the "linker" is not a real linker, as it is not only linking the existing code, it is generating and optimizing the code as well.

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