Summary

Find and optionally remove unneeded includes in C or C++ sourcefiles.

deheader analyzes C and C++ files to determine which header inclusions can be removed while still allowing them to compile. This may result in substantial improvements in compilation time, especially on large C++ projects; it also sometimes exposes dependencies and cohesions of which developers were unaware.

Resources


README.adocroadmap file
COPYINGproject license
NEWS.adocproject news
deheader-1.12.tar.gzgzipped source tarball
README.htmlroadmap file
deheader.htmlDocumentation
NEWS.htmlproject news

The project repository is at https://gitlab.com/esr/deheader.

This code is usually packaged under one of these names: deheader-git deheader.

Packaged versions

Project statistics are available at OpenHub.

If you appreciate this code (and especially if you make money by using it) please support me on Patreon.

Recent Changes

   Fuxed typo in hsearch() pattern.
   Addedd requirements for entire SUSv2 coverage.
   Spellchecked the documentation.
   Corrected an error in CMake build detection.
   Typo fixes and code hardening by ChatGPT 5.2.
   Don't over-remove duplicates when -r is specified. 

Supporters

This work is funded by...

My Bronze supporters: Martin Hohenberg, Jae Yang, Daniel Garber, Kyle Burkholder, Mike Nichols, Mark Ping, Tom Taylor, Arnold F. Williams, George Brower, Michael Nygard, Brendan Long, Sven Dowideit, Dave Witten, Jonathan Cast, James Cronin, David L. Jessup, Christopher Chang, Killer Delicious, Jacob Lyles, Neil Anuskiewicz, Mordant, Clemens Ladisch, Wojciech Woytniak, Masa Bando, John Carmack, Xingyu Wang, Jane Tang, Steven Evans, Jan Roudaut, Hsueh Sung, Ken LaCrosse, taishi28012, John Simpson, Jerod Tufte, Paul Abbott, Stan Witherspoon, Donald Greer, Gratiela Chergu, Michael Ciagala, Dale Carstensen, Chip Davis, Liudmilla Karukina, Jim McCloskey, Dewey Sasser, Hal Hildebrand, Connor Wood, Ken Kennedy, darrin, Mark Gardner, William Christensen, Malcolm Ocean, Rod Davenport, Nodarius Darjania, Cheryl Evry, Wenfeng Liang, Irving Rivas, Bill Soistman, ReallyBored, Άρης Δάσος, Ron Lauzon, TheFred, Paul Theodoropolous, Doug Phillips, Les Vogel, Matt Pollard, Andres Cordova, Umgeher Torgersen, Syeed Ali, Raghu Veer Dendukuri, Perry The Cynic, Gustav A Wirth, Mitchell Bryant, Matt Krueger, Jim Mog, John D. Taylor.

My Institutional supporters: Jason Azze and the DEVOPS team at his $DAYJOB, Christoph Happle, Symmetry Investments, Willam Duff, Mark Atwood, Caleb LaVergne, zariah mccall.

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