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Asked: 2026-05-10T16:24:55+00:00

When authoring a library in a particular namespace, it’s often convenient to provide overloaded

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When authoring a library in a particular namespace, it’s often convenient to provide overloaded operators for the classes in that namespace. It seems (at least with g++) that the overloaded operators can be implemented either in the library’s namespace:

namespace Lib { class A { };  A operator+(const A&, const A&); } // namespace Lib

or the global namespace

namespace Lib { class A { }; } // namespace Lib  Lib::A operator+(const Lib::A&, const Lib::A&);

From my testing, they both seem to work fine. Is there any practical difference between these two options? Is either approach better?

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1 Answer

  1. You should define them in the library namespace. The compiler will find them anyway through argument dependant lookup.

    No need to pollute the global namespace.

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