How to implement a factory design pattern in C ?
Jul 17, 2025 am 12:33 AMTo implement the factory design pattern in C , first define a common interface, then create concrete product classes, implement a factory class with a static creation method, and finally use the factory to decouple object creation from client code. (1) Define an abstract base class Product with a pure virtual method use(). (2) Implement ConcreteProductA and ConcreteProductB that override use(). (3) Create ProductFactory with a static method createProduct() that returns a product based on input type. (4) In main(), use the factory to create and manage objects through the base interface, preferably using smart pointers for automatic memory management.
Implementing the factory design pattern in C is a clean way to handle object creation without exposing the instantiation logic to the client. The core idea is to use a separate class (the factory) to decide which class to instantiate based on input or context. Here's how to do it effectively.

Define a Common Interface
The first step is to define a common base class or interface that all the products (the objects you want to create) will inherit from. This ensures that each object created by the factory can be used interchangeably.
class Product { public: virtual void use() = 0; virtual ~Product() = default; };
This interface defines a method use()
that all derived classes must implement. Using a pure virtual function makes Product
an abstract class, which enforces a contract for all subclasses.

Create Concrete Product Classes
Next, define the actual classes that implement the interface. These are the objects that the factory will create.
class ConcreteProductA : public Product { public: void use() override { std::cout << "Using Product A\n"; } }; class ConcreteProductB : public Product { public: void use() override { std::cout << "Using Product B\n"; } };
These two classes implement the use()
method differently, but they can both be treated as Product*
pointers, which is essential for the factory to work.

Implement the Factory Class
The factory class contains a method that decides which product to return. This is often based on an input parameter like a string or enum.
class ProductFactory { public: static Product* createProduct(const std::string& type) { if (type == "A") { return new ConcreteProductA(); } else if (type == "B") { return new ConcreteProductB(); } return nullptr; } };
Some points to note:
- This is a static method, so you don’t need to instantiate the factory to use it.
- You can easily extend the logic to support more product types.
- Don’t forget to handle invalid input (e.g., return
nullptr
or throw an exception).
Use the Factory
Now you can use the factory without knowing the exact type of object being created:
int main() { Product* product = ProductFactory::createProduct("A"); if (product) { product->use(); delete product; } return 0; }
Here’s what’s happening:
- The factory decides which object to create.
- The client code uses the returned object through the base interface.
- Memory is manually managed (
new
anddelete
), so be careful with ownership.
If you're using modern C , consider returning a smart pointer like std::unique_ptr<product></product>
from the factory method to avoid manual memory management.
That's the basic structure. It's straightforward, but it's powerful when you need to centralize and decouple object creation logic.
The above is the detailed content of How to implement a factory design pattern in C ?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!

Hot AI Tools

Undress AI Tool
Undress images for free

Undresser.AI Undress
AI-powered app for creating realistic nude photos

AI Clothes Remover
Online AI tool for removing clothes from photos.

Clothoff.io
AI clothes remover

Video Face Swap
Swap faces in any video effortlessly with our completely free AI face swap tool!

Hot Article

Hot Tools

Notepad++7.3.1
Easy-to-use and free code editor

SublimeText3 Chinese version
Chinese version, very easy to use

Zend Studio 13.0.1
Powerful PHP integrated development environment

Dreamweaver CS6
Visual web development tools

SublimeText3 Mac version
God-level code editing software (SublimeText3)

Hot Topics

High-frequency trading is one of the most technologically-rich and capital-intensive areas in the virtual currency market. It is a competition about speed, algorithms and cutting-edge technology that ordinary market participants are hard to get involved. Understanding how it works will help us to have a deeper understanding of the complexity and specialization of the current digital asset market. For most people, it is more important to recognize and understand this phenomenon than to try it yourself.

RAII is an important technology used in resource management in C. Its core lies in automatically managing resources through the object life cycle. Its core idea is: resources are acquired at construction time and released at destruction, thereby avoiding leakage problems caused by manual release. For example, when there is no RAII, the file operation requires manually calling fclose. If there is an error in the middle or return in advance, you may forget to close the file; and after using RAII, such as the FileHandle class encapsulates the file operation, the destructor will be automatically called after leaving the scope to release the resource. 1.RAII is used in lock management (such as std::lock_guard), 2. Memory management (such as std::unique_ptr), 3. Database and network connection management, etc.

To determine whether std::optional has a value, you can use the has_value() method or directly judge in the if statement; when returning a result that may be empty, it is recommended to use std::optional to avoid null pointers and exceptions; it should not be abused, and Boolean return values or independent bool variables are more suitable in some scenarios; the initialization methods are diverse, but you need to pay attention to using reset() to clear the value, and pay attention to the life cycle and construction behavior.

There are four common methods to obtain the first element of std::vector: 1. Use the front() method to ensure that the vector is not empty, has clear semantics and is recommended for daily use; 2. Use the subscript [0], and it also needs to be judged empty, with the performance comparable to front() but slightly weaker semantics; 3. Use *begin(), which is suitable for generic programming and STL algorithms; 4. Use at(0), without manually null judgment, but low performance, and throw exceptions when crossing the boundary, which is suitable for debugging or exception handling; the best practice is to call empty() first to check whether it is empty, and then use the front() method to obtain the first element to avoid undefined behavior.

The core of PHP's development of AI text summary is to call external AI service APIs (such as OpenAI, HuggingFace) as a coordinator to realize text preprocessing, API requests, response analysis and result display; 2. The limitation is that the computing performance is weak and the AI ecosystem is weak. The response strategy is to leverage APIs, service decoupling and asynchronous processing; 3. Model selection needs to weigh summary quality, cost, delay, concurrency, data privacy, and abstract models such as GPT or BART/T5 are recommended; 4. Performance optimization includes cache, asynchronous queues, batch processing and nearby area selection. Error processing needs to cover current limit retry, network timeout, key security, input verification and logging to ensure the stable and efficient operation of the system.

Bit operation can efficiently implement the underlying operation of integers, 1. Check whether the i-th bit is 1: Use n&(1

std::is_same is used to determine whether the two types are exactly the same at compile time and return a bool value. 1. In the basic usage, std::is_same::value is true when T and U are exactly the same, otherwise it is false. Different modifiers such as const, reference, pointer, etc. will cause false; 2. You can remove the type modification with std::remove_const, std::remove_reference and other types, and then compare it to achieve more flexible type judgment; 3. It is often used in template metaprogramming in practical applications, such as conditional compilation with ifconstexpr, and perform different logic according to different types; 4.

std::stringstream is used in C for string conversion, splitting and splicing strings with basic data types. 1. You can convert the string to int, float, double and other types, use the >> operator to extract the value, and check whether it is successful through ss.fail(); 2. You can process compound strings and extract multiple fields with spaces or separators, which are suitable for parsing CSV files and other scenarios; 3. Support
