this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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What's the point of having friends when the whole point of private fields is to ensure that you don't break other parts when changing those?
It’s just another option, don’t gotta use it. Maybe you find yourself needing something like this, and the only other choice is making it public. At least with friend classes, you know which classes are friends so you can go look for any dependencies
It's not a choice of mine when I'm trying to read through / modify some legacy code base
Meh, that already comes with infinite problems, so what's one more?
There's infinite ways to organize code. In C# or Rust where this isn't an option, you might use nested classes or traits hidden behind a module/namespace.
Good use cases are data structures with associated helper classes. For example, a collection/tree and an iterator/tree-walker for working with elements of the collection. Or for something like a smart memory allocator (an arena or slab allocator), you might use a friend-class to wrap elements returned from the allocator, representing their connection back to it (for freeing up when done or to manage the allocation structure in ie a heap or sorted tree).