I just wanted to add to this discussion that I am just compiling on VS and GCC, and used to use include guards. I have now switched to #pragma once, and the only reason for me is not performance or portability or standard as I don't really care what is standard as long as VS and GCC support it, and that is that:
#pragma once reduces possibilities for bugs.
It is all too easy to copy and paste a header file to another header file, modify it to suit ones needs, and forget to change the name of the include guard. Once both are included, it takes you a while to track down the error, as the error messages aren't necessarily clear.
