A simple if (false) will get optimized out by any modern C or C++ compiler with optimizations on, but the problem is that the compiler will still parse and spend time on what’s inside the if-block and it has to be legal code, whereas with the #if 0 trick the whole thing gets yeeted away by the preprocessor before even the compiler gets to look at it regardless of whether that block contains errors or not, it’s literally just a string manipulation.

I think you missed the whole point of my comment 😂. Regardless, the time spent compiling a small snippet of code is completely negligible. In the end, both #if 0 and if (false) have their complimentary uses.

Yeah, but I still think if (false) is silly because it adds an artificial constraint which is to make sure the disabled parts always compile even when you’re not using them. The equivalent of that would be having to check that all the revisions of a single source file compile against your current codebase.

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