For instance, I was optimizing build times on one project and I noticed that one DLL was exporting about two thousand functions and classes (_dllexport) when it only needed to export two functions. This was slowing down the build for two reasons:

• The export table was about 1 MByte, due to the long decorated names.
• The inline member functions and automatically generated class functions, like operator= and the copy constructor, were being generated for some classes in every single source file! Why? Because each source file knew that these classes were exported and new that somebody had to generate these functions and didn't know whether any other source files would generate them. This created many megabytes of redundant code that the linker then had to remove.

Also, the project had many small source files. Each file took about 1.5 seconds to build. If I merged twenty source files together then the merged file took about 1.6 seconds to build. In other words, by sensibly merging some source files I could speed up the build pretty much as much as I wanted to. This is a build optimization that works on virtually all compilers.

The morals?

• Don't export functions or classes that don't need exporting.
• Don't include enormous class definitions from hundreds of source files.
• Be wary of the automatic operator= and copy constructor functions for large classes since they are implicitly huge inline functions.
• Be wary of the interaction between inline functions and _dllexport.
• Small source files can be very inefficient.

Please contact me if you have any questions.