According to MSVC manual (*1), cl.exe can skip including a header file when that: - contains #pragma once, or - starts with #ifndef, or - starts with #if ! defined. GCC has a similar trick (*2), but it acts more stricter (e. g. there must be _no tokens_ outside of #ifndef...#endif). Sun C lacked #pragma once for a looong time. Oracle Developer Studio 12.5 finally implemented it, but we cannot assume such recent version. This changeset modifies header files so that each of them include strictly one #ifndef...#endif. I believe this is the most portable way to trigger compiler optimizations. [Bug #16770] *1: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/preprocessor/once *2: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/cppinternals/Guard-Macros.html