pragma once

In the C and C++ programming languages, #pragma once is a non-standard but widely supported preprocessor directive designed to cause the current source file to be included only once in a single compilation. Thus, #pragma once serves the same purpose as #include guards, but with several advantages, including: less code, avoidance of name clashes, and sometimes improvement in compilation speed.^[1]

Example

File "grandparent.h"

#pragma once
 
struct foo 
{
    int member;
};

File "parent.h"

#include "grandparent.h"

File "child.c"

#include "grandparent.h"
#include "parent.h"

Advantages

The most common alternative to #pragma once is to use #define to set an include guard macro, the name of which is picked by the programmer to be unique to that file. For example,

#ifndef GRANDPARENT_H
#define GRANDPARENT_H
... contents of grandparent.h
#endif /* !GRANDPARENT_H */

This is more complicated, possibly less efficient, and prone to error as there are no mechanisms to prevent a programmer accidentally using the same macro name in more than one file, which would result in only one of the files being included. This problem renders #pragma once to be advantageous. Since the compiler itself is responsible for handling #pragma once, the programmer cannot make errors which cause name clashes.

Using #pragma once instead of include guards will, for some compilers, improve compilation speed since it is a higher-level mechanism; the compiler itself can compare filenames or inodes without having to invoke the C preprocessor to scan the header for #ifndef and #endif. It is important to note that some compilers such as GCC, Clang, and EDG-based compilers include specific optimizations to recognize and optimize the handling of include guards, and thus little or no speedup benefit is obtained from the use of #pragma once.^[2][3][4]

Caveats

Identifying the same file on a file system is not a trivial task.^[5] Symbolic links and hard links may cause the same file to be found under different names. Compilers may use a heuristic that compares file size, modification time and content.^[6] This backfires when the same file is intentionally copied into several parts of a project. With include guard based on file path these copies would be treated differently while #pragma once will arbitrarily treat them as the same file in a compiler-dependent way.

Portability

References