My team works on code that uses a lot of static initialization for global variables. Based on this difficult experience, I would highly recommend initializing the factories inside of functions called after main() has started, rather than in static initializers. The amount of code to make this work correctly across platforms is nontrivial. In fact, we require that a certain initialization function be called as soon as main() has started, just to clean up all of the messes left by doing static initialization of so many things. I believe that this original design was a mistake - but we have too much code to change it overnight. I wouldn't call it "doomed to failure" - just difficult to get right, and probably not worth the effort to get it right. I wrote some code for the sandbox a while ago that does this: http://boost-extension.redshoelace.com/docs/boost/extension/boost_extension/... It works for both static and dynamic linking, and for shared libraries that are determined at run time (the shared libraries need to have been compiled with the same compiler options). It also allows arbitrary constructor signatures, inheritance across shared libraries, reflection and a few other features. I've been waiting to finalize the reflection functionality (it works, but I don't like parts of the API) until C++0x is more finalized in the various compilers. Jeremy Pack