Finding C++ static initialization order problems

Question

We\'ve run into some problems with the static initialization order fiasco, and I\'m looking for ways to comb through a whole lot of code to find possible occurrences. Any s

Answer 1

We've run into some problems with the static initialization order fiasco, and I'm looking for ways to comb through a whole lot of code to find possible occurrences. Any suggestions on how to do this efficiently?

It's not a trivial problem but at least it can done following fairly simple steps if you have an easy-to-parse intermediate-format representation of your code.

1) Find all the globals that have non-trivial constructors and put them in a list.

2) For each of these non-trivially-constructed objects, generate the entire potential-function-tree called by their constructors.

3) Walk through the non-trivially-constructor function tree and if the code references any other non-trivially constructed globals (which are quite handily in the list you generated in step one), you have a potential early-static-initialization-order issue.

4) Repeat steps 2 & 3 until you have exhausted the list generated in step 1.

Note: you may be able to optimize this by only visiting the potential-function-tree once per object class rather than once per global instance if you have multiple globals of a single class.