Question

While working with templates I ran into a need to make a base class constructors accessible from inherited classes for object creation to decrease copy/paste operations.
I was thinking to do this through using keyword in same manner with functions case, but that not work.

class A
{
public: 
    A(int val) {}
};

class B : public A
{
};

class C : public A
{
public:
    C(const string &val) {}
};

class D : public A
{
public:
    D(const string &val) {}
    using A::A;              // g++ error: A::A names constructor
};

void main()
{
    B b(10);                // Ok.   (A::A constructor is not overlapped)
    C c(10);                // error: no matching function to call to 'C::C(int)'
}

So my question: Is there any way to import a base class constructors after new ones in inherited class been declared?

Or there is only one alternative to declare new constructors and call a base ones from initializer list?

Answer 1

Prefer initialization:

class C : public A
{
public:
    C(const string &val) : A(anInt) {}
};

In C++11, you can use inheriting constructors (which has the syntax seen in your example D).

Update: Inheriting Constructors have been available in GCC since version 4.8.

---

If you don’t find initialization appealing (e.g. due to the number of possibilities in your actual case), then you might favor this approach for some TMP constructs:

class A
{
public: 
    A() {}
    virtual ~A() {}
    void init(int) { std::cout << "A\n"; }
};

class B : public A
{
public:
    B() : A() {}
    void init(int) { std::cout << "B\n"; }
};

class C : public A
{
public:
    C() : A() {}
    void init(int) { std::cout << "C\n"; }
};

class D : public A
{
public:
    D() : A() {}
    using A::init;
    void init(const std::string& s) { std::cout << "D -> " << s << "\n"; }
};

int main()
{
    B b; b.init(10);
    C c; c.init(10);
    D d; d.init(10); d.init("a");

    return 0;
}