With both Visual C++ and GCC supporting pragma once
completely, I do not see any reason to still use the include guards. Include guards were always a messy solution and I am glad that their death certificate has been written. For example, I would typically use a ALL_CAPS
version of the header filename as the defined name. But then, one had to remember to change this whenever the file was renamed. Also, an include guard involved two pieces of code (the #ifndef-#define
and the #endif
) between which the header code was placed, again too messy and problematic.
In comparison, using #pragma once
is straightforward. As a bonus, the horrendous C++ compilation time might be reduced a bit due to optimizations for pragma once by both these compilers.
