You seem to misunderstand what moc does. This page should help you: https://woboq.com/blog/moc-myths.html https://woboq.com/blog/moc-myths.html Moc just adds s

You seem to misunderstand what moc does. This page should help you: https://woboq.com/blog/moc-myths.html https://woboq.com/blog/moc-myths.html Moc just adds some more generated code next to you valid C++ code, generally in a new translation unit. That generated code is just boiler plate which you could write by hand if you wanted. In a sense this is what verdigris does: it provides macros that makes makes it easier to "write it by hand" (the W_OBJECT_IMPL macro somehow expends to the code generated by moc)