3 ms·
I think it can be both things. Haven't you ever seen someone do struct Thing; struct OtherThing; in lieu of just including "thing.h"? I see it freque
by colonwqbang 3y ago
I think it can be both things.
Haven't you ever seen someone do
struct Thing;
struct OtherThing;
in lieu of just including "thing.h"? I see it frequently in real life code bases and I can't see a reason for it other than compilation time optimisation.
- gumby 3y agoSure, I do that all the time too. But you can't call a method (or look inside Thing, or pass it as an argument, only a pointer to it) without including the definition. Hmm, there might be some interesting linker hacks to patch things up post compilation. But then you'd want some way to do the forward declaration for cases where Thing could have been passed in registers...
- DerekL 3y agoThis is sometimes required to break dependency cycles. Also, you can use this to rearrange declarations in the same file.