Hi Dave, On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 7:17 AM, Dave van Soest <dsoest@xs4all.nl> wrote:
Hi Christian, Robert, others interested,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts in this discussion. I'll try to summarize your posts in this way: you both don't think it is possible to create this static plugin functionality using static initialization and get it working on every supported platform.
Actually, what I said was: Sure, you can come up with and practically use toy systems with a given
linker in a given configuration that have no problem. But when you have complex and.or derived types, or use dynamic linking, it becomes an intractable problem.
The problem here is that it is just a bad idea to use statics and type factories in this way. There will be problem after problem. What are these problems? The first problem is that of non-deterministic ordering of initialisers. The second problem is that you're doing work and calling functions before main(). The third problem are all the unknown problems that will arise by using this approach. This approach has been tried many times before. AFAICT, it has never ended well. It requires bad practise (singletons, globals). It is untestable. It doesn't work well with DLL's. If you use it in a threaded application, there will be problems because of the globals. It doesn't scale to use types that have other type components, or derive from other types. Yes, it can work in a simple, limited case. But because of the scaling problems, it is inadvisable to do this. I think that perhaps everyone has to try to do this once, before they realise that it is a bad idea ;) I could well be wrong, and I don't think I will dissuade you from continuing your work on this. Best of luck. Best, Christian.