CppCon 2026

AI agents are accelerating code generation at an unprecedented pace, yet C++ file is still compiled as a monolithic translation unit, meaning a many-core machine often cannot rebuild a template-heavy file much faster than a single core. Header-heavy designs, inline functions, and templates compound the problem: the same bodies are parsed repeatedly, and small edits can invalidate an entire translation unit.

This talk presents a compiler-agnostic technique for splitting translation units into smaller independently compilable units. Using libclang, the tool rewrites headers and sources into declaration-only interfaces plus generated .cpp fragments, backed by a shared preamble that can turn into a C++ module, precompiled header, cached serialized AST and a source-map. The fragments compile in parallel, then link into a binary functionally equivalent to the original monolithic build.

Expect benchmarks from major codebases covering compile-time, link-time, and run-time performance; live demos of fast incremental updates that avoid reprocessing unchanged code as well as an analysis of the resulting binaries layout.