Declare a reference and initialize later?

Question

I have a reference to MyOjbect, but the the exact object depends on a condition. So I want to do something like this:

MyObject& ref; 
if([co         


        

Answer 1

I usually do this (C++ 11 or later):

std::shared_ptr pObj;
if(condition)
    pObj = std::make_shared(args_to_constructor_1);
else
    pObj = std::make_shared(args_to_constructor_2);

which is clean and allows using object definition with (possibly different) constructions, a thing you can't do directly with pointers as the compiler will complain from using temporary objects.