Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!
Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.
Post History
I'm using an object-oriented design for my C project and trying to implement classes with private encapsulation. How do I do this? Some things I've tried that are problematic: Using a struct f...
#1: Initial revision
by
Lundin
·
2021-09-01T09:27:21Z (about 3 years ago)
How to do private encapsulation in C?
I'm using an object-oriented design for my C project and trying to implement classes with private encapsulation. How do I do this? Some things I've tried that are problematic: - Using a struct for my class and placing the struct definition in the header file, then designing the API around this and telling the user "please don't access the struct members" through comments/documentation. Clearly this doesn't actually give private encapsulation since the caller can access all struct members freely. And users using private members intentionally isn't as much of a problem as them doing so unintentionally (for example by getting suggestions from "code completion" IDEs). - Using `static` file scope variables for private members inside the .c file of the class. This does fix the private encapsulation, but now I can't declare multiple instances of the class, it's essentially "singleton" since there is just one instance of the static file scope variables. And it isn't thread-safe either. Are there other alternatives?