It's not the case with this meme, but in C++ template definitions have to be defined in the headers if they're not full template specializations

Gonna go with... whoosh

I know that header files have some pretty horrible issues with templates and cyclic dependencies and so on, but from an organisational perspective I really like them. If I have to implement some complicated algorithm I could easily have a thousand likes + of Code, but the header still quite nicely shows the general structure in one or two screens. Whenever I do classes in python I start wishing for headers at like 300 lines, simply because I loose track of all the functions I already made.

Maybe I'm just not a good python programmer tho.

If C++/C were real languages for real programming they'd enforce this in the compiler.

No sane language designer would say "it is imperative that you do not implement your class in its header file" then write a compiler designer to say "oh you implemented your code in the header file? lol lmao that rocks"

They have played you all for fools.

There is an issue with templated code where the implementation does have to be in the header as well, though that is not the case here. C++20 introduced modules which I guess were meant to sort out this mess, but it has been a rocky road getting them to be supported by compilers.

The reason is that header files are pretty much copy/pasted into your c files when you include them. so the code in them keeps getting recompiled for every c file, which drastically increases overall build times. If you only declare in the header and have one c file implementing the functions you compile them only once.

Yep, first thing that comes to mind is that header only classes need to use inline functions.

It's horrible, I did pure C for years but now I have to code in C++11 or worst like C++17