Why should the "PIMPL" idiom be used? [duplicate]

Question

I think most people refer to this as the Handle Body idiom. See James Coplien's book Advanced C++ Programming Styles and Idioms. It's also known as the Cheshire Cat because of Lewis Caroll's character that fades away until only the grin remains.

The example code should be distributed across two sets of source files. Then only Cat.h is the file that is shipped with the product.

CatImpl.h is included by Cat.cpp and CatImpl.cpp contains the implementation for CatImpl::Purr(). This won't be visible to the public using your product.

Basically the idea is to hide as much as possible of the implementation from prying eyes.

This is most useful where you have a commercial product that is shipped as a series of libraries that are accessed via an API that the customer's code is compiled against and linked to.

We did this with the rewrite of IONA's Orbix 3.3 product in 2000.

As mentioned by others, using his technique completely decouples the implementation from the interface of the object. Then you won't have to recompile everything that uses Cat if you just want to change the implementation of Purr().

This technique is used in a methodology called design by contract.

• Because you want Purr() to be able to use private members of CatImpl. Cat::Purr() would not be allowed such an access without a friend declaration.
• Because you then don't mix responsibilities: one class implements, one class forwards.

For what is worth, it separates the implementation from the interface. This is usually not very important in small size projects. But, in large projects and libraries, it can be used to reduce the build times significantly.

Consider that the implementation of Cat may include many headers, may involve template meta-programming which takes time to compile on its own. Why should a user, who just wants to use the Cat have to include all that? Hence, all the necessary files are hidden using the pimpl idiom (hence the forward declaration of CatImpl), and using the interface does not force the user to include them.

I'm developing a library for nonlinear optimization (read "lots of nasty math"), which is implemented in templates, so most of the code is in headers. It takes about five minutes to compile (on a decent multi-core CPU), and just parsing the headers in an otherwise empty .cpp takes about a minute. So anyone using the library has to wait a couple of minutes every time they compile their code, which makes the development quite tedious. However, by hiding the implementation and the headers, one just includes a simple interface file, which compiles instantly.

It does not necessarily have anything to do with protecting the implementation from being copied by other companies - which wouldn't probably happen anyway, unless the inner workings of your algorithm can be guessed from the definitions of the member variables (if so, it is probably not very complicated and not worth protecting in the first place).

If your class uses the PIMPL idiom, you can avoid changing the header file on the public class.

This allows you to add/remove methods to the PIMPL class, without modifying the external class's header file. You can also add/remove #includes to the PIMPL too.

When you change the external class's header file, you have to recompile everything that #includes it (and if any of those are header files, you have to recompile everything that #includes them, and so on).