Most scripts processed by perl during build involve the invocation of the C preprocessor ( via gcc etc. ) for each script. As per bug #143370 this can have a major impact on build times. A proposal is made in #143370 to remove the use of C preprocessor directives. The next step would be to remove the use of the preprocessor. In an ideal world, all C directives could be removed from all files, and preprocessor.pm be replaced with a simple perl chomp() in all the tools. As a first step, I propose adding a command option to replace preprocessor with chomp only for certain cases and gradually enable it, starting post but #143370 with the IDL preprocessor.