C++ have\u00a0stagnated for many years, and many developers were\u00a0confident that the language will have the same destiny as Cobol, Fortran and VB6. No new projects will be developed with it and \u00a0C++ developers will just do the maintenance of the existing projects. But against all odds, C++ reborn from its ashes and the new standards changes a lot how the language is used.<\/p>\n
But the legacy \u00a0#include<\/span><\/tt>\u00a0mechanism is still there. \u00a0After the modernization of the language, it became the next weak link to improve. Indeed, it has many disadvantages, here are some of them from this interesting document<\/a>.<\/p>\n The solution \u00a0addressing\u00a0 these problems was already introduced in the first drafts of C++0x<\/a>, it\u00a0concern the Modules feature. However it was postponned for each new standard specification.<\/p>\n [adrotate banner=”3″]<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Modules improve access to libraries \u00a0with more robust and more efficient semantic model. From the user\u2019s perspective, the code looks only slightly different, because one uses an\u00a0import<\/span><\/tt>\u00a0declaration rather than a\u00a0#include<\/span><\/tt>\u00a0preprocessor directive, here\u2019s an example from the C++0x draft:<\/p>\n No need to include many files of STL, just one import is sufficient, the code became more cleaner.\u00a0The\u00a0module import \u00a0loads a binary representation of the\u00a0std\u00a0<\/span><\/tt>module and makes its API available to the application directly. Preprocessor definitions that precede the import declaration have no impact on the API provided by\u00a0std<\/span><\/tt>\u00a0because the module itself was compiled as a separate, standalone module.<\/p>\n Here’s an interesting post to show how to develop a C++ module using VS2017<\/p>\n Using C++ Modules in Visual Studio 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
import std; \/\/ Module import directive.\r\nint main() {\r\n std::cout << \u201cHello World\\n\u201d;\r\n}\r\n<\/pre>\n