return type ... differs from that in the declaration

[fafner]

I have two classes, Scene and ShaderInfo, and they need to know about each other. To avoid circular includes, I used a forward declaration of ShaderInfo in Scene, but now I'm getting this error:

return type of out-of-line definition of 'Scene::hitObjects' differs from that in the declaration

If I use normal include rather than forward declaration, I get an error saying

error: unknown type name 'ShaderInfo'

from the Scene class. What can I do to make this compile?

[helios]

This happens when you have a member function declared as

class A{
    B foo();
};

and defined as

C A::foo(){
    //...
}

The return types have to match.

[fafner]

No, they are the same:

ShaderInfo hitObjects(Ray &ray, float &t);

and

ShaderInfo Scene::hitObjects(Ray &ray, float &t) {
...

EDIT: The full error msg is

error: return type of out-of-line definition of 'Scene::hitObjects' differs from that in the declaration
ShaderInfo Scene::hitObjects(Ray &ray, float &t) {
                  ^
../core/Scene.h:35:13: note: previous declaration is here
        ShaderInfo hitObjects(Ray &ray, float &t);

[Zhuge]

I feel like this is a long shot, but do you have ShaderInfo as a nested class inside Scene as well as outside, so that "ShaderInfo" refers to different classes in each position or something?

[helios]

Maybe 'ShaderInfo' has a different meaning in the .cpp? If you tell your IDE to take you to the definition, does it take you to the same place from either location?

[fafner]

Thanks for your replies, I ended up doing things a little differently than I had planned. So, no solution to this one I'm afraid :P