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Is there any tool or method that can speed up this process?

For instance I just split neatTrick.cpp source file into two separate files neatTrickImplementation.cpp and neatTrickTests.cpp.

What I have to do now is to go through the list of #includes at the top of neatTrick.cpp and determine which of them need to go into the implementation file, and which need to go into the tests file. Some of the headers are required for both of them, some are not. Some may even be completely unnecessary.

I feel like my process (start with nothing, compile, see what's broken, add proper include, compile again, repeat) will produce the most unbloated code but it is so frustratingly slow. I think it'd be great if my IDE could analyze the rest of the headers in my project, see which ones could eliminate the current set of errors, and automate this task for me.

Steven Lu
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    I doubt it because conditional compilation (`#if___`), overloading, and other aspects of C++ would make such a tool extremely error prone. For what it's worth, extra header files will almost never cause emitted code to be larger (except perhaps for symbolic debugging information). – Gene Jun 13 '12 at 05:20
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    You might want to read [this](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/614794/c-c-detecting-superfluous-includes) – jxh Jun 13 '12 at 05:57

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There was a talk by Chandler Carruth on Microsoft's "Going Native" (a C++ conference) where he said that the Clang tooling project had something in the pipeline to solve exactly this problem.

From my understanding, it was presented as something no publically available tool is able to do at the moment and most people were pretty impressed by this.

So: At the moment, there currently is no such tool. In the near future you will probably get something like this as a Clang-based tool to compile for yourself. Long-term, expect this to be a standard feature built upon a Clang toolchain.

(A bit OT: There currently is a discussion on the Clang/LLVM developers list dealing with a tooling/service infrastructure. The tools are not there yet but are under active development, currently by Google engineers, later probably by people in the whole industry and Clang open source community).

Manuel
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During the ACCU conference at Oxford last April, one of the speakers, Peter Sommerlad, demoed exactly this functionality with a plugin for Eclipse CDT, written by one of his students. I don't know if this plugin is already publicly available, but maybe you could drop him an e-mail to ask...

Pat
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