Forward declaration of a typedef in C++

You can do forward typedef. But to do

typedef A B;

you must first forward declare A:

class A;

typedef A B;

For those of you like me, who are looking to forward declare a C-style struct that was defined using typedef, in some c++ code, I have found a solution that goes as follows...

// a.h
 typedef struct _bah {
    int a;
    int b;
 } bah;

// b.h
 struct _bah;
 typedef _bah bah;

 class foo {
   foo(bah * b);
   foo(bah b);
   bah * mBah;
 };

// b.cpp
 #include "b.h"
 #include "a.h"

 foo::foo(bah * b) {
   mBah = b;
 }

 foo::foo(bah b) {
   mBah = &b;
 }

To "fwd declare a typedef" you need to fwd declare a class or a struct and then you can typedef declared type. Multiple identical typedefs are acceptable by compiler.

long form:

class MyClass;
typedef MyClass myclass_t;

short form:

typedef class MyClass myclass_t;

In C++ (but not plain C), it's perfectly legal to typedef a type twice, so long as both definitions are completely identical:

// foo.h
struct A{};
typedef A *PA;

// bar.h
struct A;  // forward declare A
typedef A *PA;
void func(PA x);

// baz.cc
#include "bar.h"
#include "foo.h"
// We've now included the definition for PA twice, but it's ok since they're the same
...
A x;
func(&x);