Re: Can static member variables be declared "inline"?

From:

James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.c++

Date:

Wed, 3 Sep 2008 00:58:35 -0700 (PDT)

Message-ID:

<51fbb8a3-6303-458a-98ca-83e98d708f80@a1g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>

On Sep 2, 6:31 pm, Marco Manfredini <ok_nospam...@phoyd.net> wrote:

James Kanze wrote:

On Sep 2, 1:06 pm, Marco Manfredini <ok_nospam...@phoyd.net> wrote:

James Kanze wrote:

[treat "inline" as "the definition is inlined into the interface"]

Seriously, why do you want to do it?

Header-only implementations of libraries (with globals) would
be an application.

But why would you want to do that? If your code is all
templates, you may have to, but it's really something which
you'd want to avoid, no?

Having the implementation and interface in one file is really
handy, because you don't have to maintain the build of the
implementation file (or even a separate library) anymore. Also
it simplifies code sharing between libraries or shared
objects, because you are untroubled by duplicate definition
problems. Also, deployment is trivial and binary compatibility
a non-issue.

Which is all fine for toy projects, but anytime you modify a
header, you have to recompile all of the client code. So you
want as little as possible in the header---ideally, only the
API definitions. (Why do you think the compilation firewall
idiom is so popular?)

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