Can we circumvent the private access rules without relying on techniques that are considered “arcane” and likely to be made illegal (at some point)?

I recently read the article Profiting from the Folly of Others by Alastair Harrison, which walks through a technique to circumvent private access rules, particularly by means of (ab)using the template instantiation mechanism together with injections of inline friend definitions. I first saw this technique used in Filip Roséen’s blog article series on stateful metaprogramming back in 2015, which made use of it to implement a constexpr-counter that were, if not fully, at the very least nearly¹ standard compliant. A. Harrison’s article mentions that the origin of the technique is likely two blog articles by Johannes Schaub published in 2010-2011².

What is the difference between typedef declarations and alias declarations?

A common question, particularly for developers migrating from pre-C++11 projects to more modern C++, is whether there are any differences between typedef declarations and alias declarations.

// target_specific_fixed_width_types.h
typedef float Float32_t;   // typedef declaration
using Float64_t = double;  // alias declaration

Is(/are) there any scenario(s) where a name, which refers to an entity, actually refers to a different types (whilst still referring to the same entity) depending on context and/or scope? Or, to put it in another way, is(/are) there any scenario(s) where the type of a named entity changes depending on context and/or scope?

What is an aggregate class?

Aggregate class types make up a special family of class types that can be, particularly, initialized by means of aggregate initialization, using direct-list-init or copy-list-init, T aggr_obj{arg1, arg2, ...} and T aggr_obj = {arg1, arg2, ...}, respectively.

What is an example of a non-deduced context, and why can it be useful to know about these?

The following snippet

template<typename T>
struct Foo { T t; };

template<typename T>
void addToFoo(Foo<T>& foo, T val) { foo.t += val; }

int main() {
    Foo<long> f{42};
    addToFoo(f, 13); // error: no matching function for call to 'addToFoo'
    return 0;
}

is ill-formed, as (function) template argument deduction for the dependent function parameters foo and val of the addToFoo function template resolves to different, conflicting types in the addToFoo(f, 13) function call.

I few weeks ago I decided to set up a personal blog, aimed primarily at software development topics, but possibly also containing one or another post about my other interests; climbing/bouldering and writing and performing music. Starting with this post, the blog is now up.