Forward Declaration of a Base Class 什么时候该用

You can not use forward declarations in any of those cases as the compiler needs to know the size of the class.

You can only use forward declaration in a set of operations:

• declaring functions that take the forward declared class as parameters or returns it
• declaring member pointers or references to the forward declared class
• declaring static variables of the forward declared type in the class definition

You cannot use it to

• declare a member attribute of the given type (compiler requires size)
• define or create an object of the type or delete it
• call any static or member method of the class or access any member or static attribute

At the end, the advice that was given to you by Roddy: forward declare as much as you can, but assume that some things must be included.