Question

I was wondering about using or not templates, in other thread I found out that templates must be implement in the header file because of some reasons.
Thats ok, my question is if the source will be need if other programm use it?
from the logic of the other thread’s answer, it seems that even other programm would need the full implementation so the compiler can say if a line can or not use the templated function.

if yes, I guess templates are not a good thing for the developer who wants others to use his library?
if no, then we are good and templates will be used.

or if at least there is anyway to save my hard, hours spent, code from others?

(I will use stl vectors and such, but I am asking for my own code… Templates seem to be nice, save you a lot of hardcoded lines or macro abusing, but if others can read your source than it makes almost no sense[lot of sense to open projects xD])

Thanks,
Joe

Answer 1

If you want users of your library to be able to use your templates, their source code needs to be available to those users.

However you can sometimes design your template classes so that most of the logic happens in non-template classes which don’t have the full source code in the headers.