pimpl management good practice

Development
20

Sorry to reopen this thread 3 years later, I plan to update the coding_convention of VTK to add the standard way to implement a PIMPL in VTK.

I also have a potential improvement for the Utkarsh approach. It concerns the vtkInternals class which could be in his own header/source file and these files could be in a Private folder. We will have something like that:

////-------------------------
/// vtkClass.h

#include <memory> // for std::unique_ptr

class vtkClassInternals;

class vtkClass : public vtkObject
{

private:
  std::unique_ptr<vtkClassInternals> Internals;
}

////-------------------------
/// vtkClass.cpp

#include "Private/vtkClassInternals.h"

vtkClass::vtkClass()
  : Internals(new vtkClass::vtkInternals())
{
  this->Internals = std::make_unique<vtkClassInternals>();
}

vtkClass::~vtkClass() = default;

note that this is what it is already done in the WebGPU module to separate internals stuff which will not be part of the public API.

wdyt?

FYI @alexy.pellegrini @nicolas.vuaille @jaswantp

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