Question

Static members confuse me sometimes. I understand how to initialize a simple built in type such as int with something along the lines of int myClass::statVar = 10;, which you place in a .cpp file, but I have something of the following sort:

class myClass
{
public:
 // Some methods...

protected:
 static RandomGenerator itsGenerator;
}

The basic idea is simple enough: myClass needs access to a random generator for one of its member functions. I also can have only a few instances of the generator since each object is quite big. However, the RandomGenerator type needs to be “initialized”, so to speak, by a call to RandomGenerator::Randomize(), which the compiler won’t allow you to do since it’s not a const rvalue (is that right?).

So how can I make this work?

Or perhaps should I not make use of a static variable in this case, and do it some other way?

Answer 1

You could create wrapper class which will hold RandomGenerator instance in it and will call RandomGenerator::Randomize in its constructor.