Herb Sutter has prompted a variant of the Pimpl idiom that kind of goes this way, as have others. Linus was proudly showing how C was better than C++ by virtue

Herb Sutter has prompted a variant of the Pimpl idiom that kind of goes this way, as have others. Linus was proudly showing how C was better than C++ by virtue of being able to do something much like this, but of course you can accomplish this in C++, of course there are some down sides that accompany it. Most importantly with C++ you can much more easily provide more robust compile time type safety with little or no runtime overhead.