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Jun. 16th, 2010
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FQA: Empirical studies indicate that 20% of the people drink 80% of the beer. With C++ developers, the rule is that 80% of the developers understand at most 20% of the language. It is not the same 20% for different people, so don't count on them to understand each other's code.
What's the "static initialization order fiasco"?
FAQ: A subtle, frequently misunderstood source of errors, which are hard to catch because they occur before main is called. The errors can happen when the constructor of a global object defined in x.cpp accesses (directly or indirectly) a global object defined in y.cpp. The order of initialization of these objects is undefined, so you'll see the problem in 50% of the cases (an error may be triggered by a rebuild). "It's that simple".
FQA: And it's that stupid. Just look at this:
* C++ doesn't define the order of initialization of global objects.
* C++ lets you write code that depends on the order of initialization of global objects.
* C++ doesn't have a mechanism to automatically detect these errors, neither at compile time nor at run time.
* C++ doesn't make the slightest effort to help you debug the problem (for example, go figure in which actual order the objects were initialized).
FAQ: A subtle, frequently misunderstood source of errors, which are hard to catch because they occur before main is called. The errors can happen when the constructor of a global object defined in x.cpp accesses (directly or indirectly) a global object defined in y.cpp. The order of initialization of these objects is undefined, so you'll see the problem in 50% of the cases (an error may be triggered by a rebuild). "It's that simple".
FQA: And it's that stupid. Just look at this:
* C++ doesn't define the order of initialization of global objects.
* C++ lets you write code that depends on the order of initialization of global objects.
* C++ doesn't have a mechanism to automatically detect these errors, neither at compile time nor at run time.
* C++ doesn't make the slightest effort to help you debug the problem (for example, go figure in which actual order the objects were initialized).