"Emil Dotchevski" <emildotchevski@hotmail.com> writes:
Therefore, you are still prone to threading problems. There is nothing in the C++ standard which guarantees globals will be initialized before main().
According to the reference I use: The C++ Programming Language by Stroustrup page 244 10.4.9: "A global, namespace or class static object which is created once "at the start of the program" and destroyed at once at the termination of the program." I've always interpreted this to mean what it says and this is reflected in the standard.
You should use the standard rather than TC++PL for this sort of thing; only the standard is a definitive reference.
But I'm sure some else on this list can give a definitive answer as to what the standard actually says.
Emil does
3.6.2.3: It is implementation-defined whether or not the dynamic initialization (8.5, 9.4, 12.1, 12.6.1) of an object of namespace scope is <...snip...>
Emil, I agree 100% with everything you write here, but especially with this:
If there is a consensus that it is desirable to provide for automatic dynamic initialization of namespace-scope objects even if no function from their compilation unit is ever executed, perhaps this needs to be separated in a boost library of its own, as a first step of (possibly) adding such feature to the C++ standard.
Yes, that's an important thing to have in many cases, and I wish we had a portable way of doing it in C++. A Boost library (if such a thing is possible) would be a great step.
I'm not going to disagree with that. This was the first method I used and it works well and is portable. But the lack of an automatic method like "export" raised a chorus of howls which had to be addressed.
I've seen many instances of chorus of howls from folks that write sub-standard code and complain that it isn't working as they have hoped. I tend to quote the C++ standard in response.
:^) -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting www.boost-consulting.com