Translation unit (programming)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Translation unit" programming – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In C and C++ programming language terminology, a translation unit (or more casually a compilation unit) is the ultimate input to a C or C++ compiler from which an object file is generated.^[1] A translation unit roughly consists of a source file after it has been processed by the C preprocessor, meaning that header files listed in #include directives are literally included, sections of code within #ifndef may be included, and macros have been expanded.