Disclosed herein are methods and systems for creating and using pre-parsed headers. One or more header files may be scanned into tokens. These tokens may then be parsed into abstract syntax trees. The abstract syntax trees may then be serialized in a modular form into pre-parsed headers on a storage device. Based upon directives in one or more source files, the pre-parsed headers may then be deserialized into abstract syntax trees and loaded from the storage device. The loaded abstract syntax trees may then be used in the compilation of the source files.