Question

Are there any simple, effective answers to this?… aside from, “Decide which is more important”, that is.

Let me elaborate. I want a fixed size array. It represents session slots that can be opened for a socket server to accept clients. There are a limited number of these (four, at present).

Perhaps from a C++ perspective my question is all wrong. Perhaps I should be considering these as session slots which, while filled with session objects, may not necessarily be usable until a given session has a reference to a connected TCP socket. This differs from most dynamic languages where I could simply specify the session slots as null until such time as a session fills that slot in the array.

Answer 1

There’s nothing preventing you from still using pointers. Pointers can point to any non-temporary objects, including ones that live on the stack.

Example:

void func()
{
    MyObject obj;
    MyObject* p = 0;

    if(some_condition)
        p = &obj;

    ...
}