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From: beshers@select.columbia.edu (Clifford Beshers)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Global constructors and C++ I/O streams;  problems and questions.
Message-ID: <5955@columbia.edu>
Date: 20 Oct 88 01:15:54 GMT
Sender: news@columbia.edu
Reply-To: beshers@select.UUCP ()
Organization: Columbia University Department of Computer Science
Lines: 46

The following program suffers a memory fault before it ever gets
to the first line of main().  The problem lies in the constructor
of the global instance 'example hello';  the reference to the
cout stream occurs before the initialization of that stream.
Because global instances are initialized in the order in which
they are declared, this is expected;  only external references to
these streams are present in stream.h, and so their actual
declaration gets packaged into libC.a.

So, the question, is there any way around this?  It seems like
this would problem would exist for *any* class instances are
declared in some library.  Sure, I don't *really* need this
feature, but it is nice.



*****************************  Cut Here  *******************


//  The following code illustrates a problem with the interaction
//  of global constructors of user defined objects and with the
//  global constructors of system defined objects, namely standard
//  I/O streams.

#include <stream.h>

class example {
public:
	example()
	{
		cout << "Hello, world\n";
	}
};

//  Comment out this line and it works, of course.
example hello;

main()
{
	cout << "We never get to the first line...\n";
}
 

Cliff Beshers
Columbia University Computer Science Department
beshers@sylvester.cs.columbia.edu