Is it a necessary trade-off that using smart pointers requires my class to be publicly instantiable?

I have a base product class with a few private members and a public getter that derived classes inherit. I would like to disqualify instantiation, since the class is intended for use with an abstract factory. I thought protected con/destructors might work, however, this breaks my smart pointers. Friending seems like a useful disaster. Is there a well-known solution to this, or should I resign myself to the fact that any client who has the factory injected must also know enough to instantiate the base product?

class Product  {  private:      char type_name;      char size_name;  public:      Product(char, char);      virtual ~Product() {}      void Print();  };  

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67351847/is-it-a-necessary-trade-off-that-using-smart-pointers-requires-my-class-to-be-pu May 02, 2021 at 07:53AM