Type '<Module>' from assembly ... contains more methods than the current implementation allows

Question

I'm trying to compile a relatively big legacy c++ project in visual-studio-2013 using /clr flag. The project generates a dll.

I get the following run-time exception:

Type '<Module>' from assembly ... contains more methods than the current implementation allows

I must add that this happens in Debug configuration only (Release - works). Also, the project heavily uses templates and macros, which (I suppose) contribute to the large amount of generated methods...

There is little to no documentation regarding this problem. What I know from searching the net (don't know if it's accurate) is:

There is a limit of ~65K methods in a clr dll. All methods of all native classes go into some special <Module>, so it poses a global limit.

One suggestion was to split the project, but that's not very trivial, due to inter-class-dependencies. I suppose this is doable...

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I ended up separating code into two dlls, and removing some code that I wasn't using. The hard part was identifying "dead" code and making sure it's using templates extensively (otherwise I was just removing drops in a bucket).

I know it's not a solution you want to hear, but I couldn't find any other working workaround.

Answer 2

I have been struggling with this issue for a few weeks with VS2015. In the end I found the linker option :/OPT:REF which can be found under Project properties->Linker->Optomization->References. This removed about 12MB from the size of the output DLL and the exception is no longer thrown at run time.

Answer 3

You can try enabling the use of Precompiled Headers for your C++/CLI project.

After disabling the use of Precompiled Headers, I hit this limit/error in a Debug build. Then had to use the /OPT:REF trick provided by Scott's answer. Kudos to that. But it seems using Precompiled Headers can also reduce the total methods.