How do I make main a friend of my class from within a library?

Question

Please see my first attempt at answering this . I neglected to tell the whole story before in an attempt to simplify things. Turns out my example works! Sorry.

The w

Answer 1

A common answer might be to provide an "application" singleton class, like e.g. QApplication in Qt, an reduce your main to something like

int main (int argc, char** argv) {
    YourApplication app (argc, argv);
    return app.execute();
}

Then you reduce your friendness concern to class YourApplication vs your other classes, and you know how to do that.