I’m trying intending to create a single instance of a type that gets shared among the items in a vector. Each of the vector’s item types requires a pass-by-reference parameter in the constructor but I can’t seem to get the vector to initialize properly.

//The type of each item in the vector
class PollingConfig_t
{
    public: 
        PollingConfig_t(DebugPrinter_t& _debugPrinter) : _debugPrinter(debugPrinter) {}
    private:
        DebugPrinter_t& _debugPrinter; //Reference to the global instance of DebugPrinter_t
}

And for the actual globals:

DebugPrinter_t DebugPrinter(true); //One instance shared among vector items
std::vector<PollingConfig_t> PollingConfigs(4, PollingConfig_t(DebugPrinter)); //4 instances of PollingConfig_t, each with reference to DebugPrinter.

This doesn’t compile and give me an error:
error: use of deleted function 'PollingConfig_t& PollingConfig_t::operator=(const PollingConfig_t&)'

HOWEVER, I can get it work seemingly as intended if I simply remove the ampersand in the _debugPrinter declaration.

    private:
        DebugPrinter_t _debugPrinter;

But wouldn’t this create copies of the original instance DebugPrinter for each of the vector’s items? I mean if _debugPrinter is declared as a DebugPrinter_t instead of DebugPrinter_t& it’s no longer a reference, right?