Re: Unused #include statements

Hi Zoltan,

I can't make a statement for the git project but I consider this kind of brute-force removal a very problematic approach for languages like C and C++. The reason for that is simple: Often header files include other header files since their content depends on those other header files. Let's assume a header file a.h includes b.h. Now consider a file c.c includes both a.h and b.h since they are actually using stuff from both of them. Your brute-force approach would now remove b.h since it is indirectly pulled in through a.h. While the removal would no lead to technially incorrect code it would no longer reflect the semantical situation (since c.c still uses stuff from b.h). Even worse is that if you later modify c.c to no longer use stuff from a.h you could no longer remove a.h since that way you would break the chain to b.h.

Thus doing those kind of brute-force removals generally makes the include structure in a project very fragile. The analysis itself you did is still useful to identify header files that can potentially be removed but removing them without further analysis I would consider problematic.

Robert