Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> So I have to put the entire class definition into the header file. But 
> that means I have to put Secrets into the header file too - a data 
> structure that clients have absolutely no reason to know anything about. 

If having the internal-implementation-detail as a member variable of
the class is something you just must avoid, and especially if this is
a class that doesn't get instantiated a lot, then the solution is to
use the Pimpl idiom, which regardless of the funny name, is exactly what
you described. In other words, make a forward declaration of that private
class and just have a pointer to it as member.

> My question is... Is there some simple change I might make to the code 
> to avoid all the gotchas of manual memory management?

Yes: Use std::shared_ptr instead of a raw pointer. In other words, you do
it like this:

    class PrivateClass;

    class MyClass
    {
        std::shared_ptr<PrivateClass> privateObject;
    };

Then in the implementation of MyClass just do a:

    privateObject = new PrivateClass;

and then you can forget about managing it yourself.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message