Using pre-compiled headers with CMake

There is a third party CMake module named 'Cotire' which automates the use of precompiled headers for CMake based build systems and also supports unity builds.

CMake has just gained support for PCHs (pre-compiled headers), it should be available in the upcoming 3.16 release, due 2019-10-01:

https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/cmake/merge_requests/3553

  target_precompile_headers(<target>
    <INTERFACE|PUBLIC|PRIVATE> [header1...]
    [<INTERFACE|PUBLIC|PRIVATE> [header2...] ...])

There is ongoing discussion on supporting sharing PCHs between targets: https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/cmake/issues/19659

There is some additional context (motivation, numbers) available at https://blog.qt.io/blog/2019/08/01/precompiled-headers-and-unity-jumbo-builds-in-upcoming-cmake/

Here is a code snippet to allow you to use precompiled header for your project. Add the following to your CMakeLists.txt replacing myprecompiledheaders and myproject_SOURCE_FILES as appropriate:

if (MSVC)

    set_source_files_properties(myprecompiledheaders.cpp
        PROPERTIES
        COMPILE_FLAGS "/Ycmyprecompiledheaders.h"
        )
    foreach( src_file ${myproject_SOURCE_FILES} )
        set_source_files_properties(
            ${src_file}
            PROPERTIES
            COMPILE_FLAGS "/Yumyprecompiledheaders.h"
            )
    endforeach( src_file ${myproject_SOURCE_FILES} )
    list(APPEND myproject_SOURCE_FILES myprecompiledheaders.cpp)
endif (MSVC)

Well when builds take 10+ minutes on a quad core machine every time you change a single line in any of the project files it tells you its time to add precompiled headers for windows. On *nux I would just use ccache and not worry about that.

I have implemented in my main application and a few of the libraries that it uses. It works great to this point. One thing that also is needed is you have to create the pch source and header file and in the source file include all the headers that you want to be precompiled. I did this for 12 years with MFC but it took me a few minutes to recall that..

Don't even go there. Precompiled headers mean that whenever one of the headers changes, you have to rebuild everything. You're lucky if you have a build system that realizes this. More often than never, your build will just fail until you realize that you changed something that is being precompiled, and therefore you need to do a full rebuild. You can avoid this mostly by precompiling the headers that you are absolutely positive won't change, but then you're giving up a large part of the speed gain as well.

The other problem is that your namespace gets polluted with all kinds of symbols that you don't know or care about in many places where you'd be using the precompiled headers.