How to use references, avoid header bloat, and delay initialization?
- by Kyle
I was browsing for an alternative to using so many shared_ptrs, and found an excellent reply in a comment section:
Do you really need shared ownership?
If you stop and think for a few
minutes, I'm sure you can pinpoint one
owner of the object, and a number of
users of it, that will only ever use
it during the owner's lifetime. So
simply make it a local/member object
of the owners, and pass references to
those who need to use it.
I would love to do this, but the problem becomes that the definition of the owning object now needs the owned object to be fully defined first. For example, say I have the following in FooManager.h:
class Foo;
class FooManager
{
shared_ptr<Foo> foo;
shared_ptr<Foo> getFoo() { return foo; }
};
Now, taking the advice above, FooManager.h becomes:
#include "Foo.h"
class FooManager
{
Foo foo;
Foo& getFoo() { return foo; }
};
I have two issues with this. First, FooManager.h is no longer lightweight. Every cpp file that includes it now needs to compile Foo.h as well. Second, I no longer get to choose when foo is initialized. It must be initialized simultaneously with FooManager. How do I get around these issues?
