There’s a proposal on the issue titled Forward declarations of nested classes
P0289R0. However as you can see from the last Trip Report: C++ Standards Meeting in Jacksonville, February 2016, this proposal was pendent to proposals for which further work is encouraged. I’m quoting the verdict of the committee (Emphasis Mine):
This would allow things like
X::A*
to appear in a header without
requiring a definition forX
to also appear in the header
(forward-declarations ofX
andX::A
will be sufficient). EWG found the
use case compelling, because currently a lot of class definitions to
appear in headers only because interfaces defined in the header use
pointers or references to nested classes of the type. Several details
still need to be worked out. (For example, what happens if a
definition ofX
does not appear in any other translation unit (TU)?
What happens if a definition ofX
appears in another TU, but does not
define a nestedclass A
? What happens if it does define a nested class
A, but it’s private? The answer to some or all of these may have to be
“ill-formed, no diagnostic required”, because diagnosing errors of
this sort would require significant linker support.)