What is a handle in C++?

A handle is a pointer or index with no visible type attached to it. Usually you see something like:

 typedef void* HANDLE;
 HANDLE myHandleToSomething = CreateSomething();

So in your code you just pass HANDLE around as an opaque value.

In the code that uses the object, it casts the pointer to a real structure type and uses it:

 int doSomething(HANDLE s, int a, int b) {
     Something* something = reinterpret_cast<Something*>(s);
     return something->doit(a, b);
 }

Or it uses it as an index to an array/vector:

 int doSomething(HANDLE s, int a, int b) {
     int index = (int)s;
     try {
         Something& something = vecSomething[index];
         return something.doit(a, b);
     } catch (boundscheck& e) {
         throw SomethingException(INVALID_HANDLE);
     }
 }

In C++/CLI, a handle is a pointer to an object located on the GC heap. Creating an object on the (unmanaged) C++ heap is achieved using new and the result of a new expression is a "normal" pointer. A managed object is allocated on the GC (managed) heap with a gcnew expression. The result will be a handle. You can't do pointer arithmetic on handles. You don't free handles. The GC will take care of them. Also, the GC is free to relocate objects on the managed heap and update the handles to point to the new locations while the program is running.

A handle is a sort of pointer in that it is typically a way of referencing some entity.

It would be more accurate to say that a pointer is one type of handle, but not all handles are pointers.

For example, a handle may also be some index into an in memory table, which corresponds to an entry that itself contains a pointer to some object.

The key thing is that when you have a "handle", you neither know nor care how that handle actually ends up identifying the thing that it identifies, all you need to know is that it does.

It should also be obvious that there is no single answer to "what exactly is a handle", because handles to different things, even in the same system, may be implemented in different ways "under the hood". But you shouldn't need to be concerned with those differences.

A handle can be anything from an integer index to a pointer to a resource in kernel space. The idea is that they provide an abstraction of a resource, so you don't need to know much about the resource itself to use it.

For instance, the HWND in the Win32 API is a handle for a Window. By itself it's useless: you can't glean any information from it. But pass it to the right API functions, and you can perform a wealth of different tricks with it. Internally you can think of the HWND as just an index into the GUI's table of windows (which may not necessarily be how it's implemented, but it makes the magic make sense).

EDIT: Not 100% certain what specifically you were asking in your question. This is mainly talking about pure C/C++.