How to hide private base class members and methods from users

Question

Maybe I didn\'t make my question clear, the following answers are not answering my question. Let me make the question more specific. My question is that I have a base class to s

Answer 1

The way to go is to have an opaque pointer to the implementation.

class BaseImpl;

class Base {
public:
  Base(); 
 ~Base();

private:
// virtual functions to be overridden by derived classes.
virtual void Initialize() {}

private: 

// private members and functions that are not intended to override by derived classes
void Configure() { m_impl->Configure(); }
BaseImpl* m_impl;
}

Then, in the BaseImpl, you keep a pointer to the Base and you call the virtual functions as wanted. You keep BaseImpl.h in your private includes and you don't distribute it to the library users.

See: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/pimpl