How to force a static member to be initialized?

Question

Consider this example code:

template
char register_(){
    return D::get_dummy(); // static function
}

template
struct Foo{
           


        

Answer 1

Something like that comes to my mind:

// in some c++ file (to make i with internal linkage)
static int i = init_dummy(Foo::dummy);

where init_dummy is defined like this:

int init_dummy(...)
{
  return 1;
}

Due to variable args you can put more initializations there like:

static int i = init_dummy(Foo::dummy, Foo::dummy, Foo::dummy);