If you don’t want to use precompiled headers, then there is no point to using a standard include file – this will slow down the build for every file that includes it and cause them to include extra stuff that they do not need. Get rid of it and just include the headers they need.
stdafx.h is a file, generated by Microsoft Visual Studio IDE wizards, that describes both standard system and project specific include files that are used frequently but hardly ever change. Compatible compilers (for example, Visual C++ 6.0 and newer) will pre-compile this file to reduce overall compile times. Visual C++ will not compile anything before the … Read more
From Wikipedia: One interesting quirk of MFC is the use of “Afx” as the prefix for many functions, macros and the standard precompiled header name “stdafx.h”. During early development what became MFC was called “Application Framework Extensions” and abbreviated “Afx”. The name Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) was adopted too late in the release cycle to … Read more
You’re best off using precompiled headers still for fastest compilation. You can use precompiled headers in gcc as well. See here. The compiled precompiled header will have an extension appended as .gch instead of .pch. So for example if you precompile stdafx.h you will have a precompiled header that will be automatically searched for called … Read more
All C++ compilers have one serious performance problem to deal with. Compiling C++ code is a long, slow process. Compiling headers included on top of C++ files is a very long, slow process. Compiling the huge header structures that form part of Windows API and other large API libraries is a very, very long, slow … Read more