Question

I have class A (in A.h) which depends on class B in (B.h) and vice versa. Forward declaring the used functions works, but this means I have to update everywhere where I forward declared those functions in the future, ex, if I remove, or change argument in those functions they must all be updated to reflect change. I don’t feel this is good practice. Is there a way around this?

Thanks

Answer 1

If you only need to work with pointers or references to a class at the declaration level, you can do it like this:

A.h

class B; // forward class declaration

class A {
    A(B &);
};

B.h

class A;

class B {
    B(A &);
};

B.cpp

#include "B.h"
#include "A.h" // now we get the full declaration of A

B::B(A &a) {
    a.foo(5);
}

Mutual dependencies like this are tough to deal with but sometimes unavoidable.

If A and B depend on the implementations of each other, then you’ve got a system design problem that you need to resolve before proceeding further.