Question

I want to use an 3rd party library without using its header file. My code resides in its own namespace, therefore I can’t use conventional forward declaration as I don’t want to pollute the global namespace. Currently I have something like that:

3rd-party-library.h----

typedef struct {...} LibData;
void lib_func (LibData *);

my-source.h-----

namespace foo {

    /*forward declaration of LibData*/

    class Abcd {
        public:
            void ghj();
        private:
            Libdata *data_;
        };
    }//namespace foo

my-source.cpp-----
#include "my-source.h"
#include <3rd-party-library.h>

namespace foo {
    typedef ::LibData LibData;
    void Abcd::ghj() {
        //do smth with data_
        }
    }//namespace foo

Is it possible to forward declare a global type in a way that it would reside in an namespace? Plain simple typedef does not work.

Answer 1

For a forward declaration to work, you need to forward declare an object in the proper namespace. Since the original object resides in the global namespace, you need to forward declare it in the global namespace.

If you don’t like that, you can always wrap the thing in your own structure:

namespace foo {
struct libDataWrapper; }

and in your own cpp define this structure. Or you can always resort to void* and the like, if you’re up to that sort of thing.