Nifty/Schwarz counter, standard compliant?

Question

I had a discussion this morning with a colleague about static variable initialization order. He mentioned the Nifty/Schwarz counter and I\'m (sort of) puzzled. I understan

Answer 1

I believe it's guaranteed to work. According to the standard ($3.6.2/1): "Objects with static storage duration (3.7.1) shall be zero-initialized (8.5) before any other initialization takes place."

Since nifty_counter has static storage duration, it gets initialized before initializer is created, regardless of distribution across translation units.

Edit: After rereading the section in question, and considering input from @Tadeusz Kopec's comment, I'm less certain about whether it's well defined as it stands right now, but it is quite trivial to ensure that it is well-defined: remove the initialization from the definition of nifty_counter, so it looks like:

static int nifty_counter;

Since it has static storage duration, it will be zero-initialized, even without specifying an intializer -- and removing the initializer removes any doubt about any other initialization taking place after the zero-initialization.