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

I don't think you actually want to do what you are doing. This really seems like a hack and a design problem. If you really want to expose the internals of your class in some specialized circumstance, you could make an accessor class which is also defined inside your library.

Something like this might work (may need appropriate forward declarations, etc. -- this is just a starting point):

class ProcessManagerAccessor
{
public:
    ProcessManagerAccessor(ProcessManager & pm) : pm_(pm) { }

    // add public methods to expose internals
    void test() { pm_.test(); }

private:
    ProcessManager & pm_;
};

class ProcessManager
{
public:
    friend class ProcessManagerAccessor;

    // ...
};

// ...

ProcessManager pm;
ProcessManagerAccessor pma(pm);
pma.test();