C++Now 2014

C has the facility to declare data, both initialized and uninitialized, that is available to whole programs. C++ extends this with the ability to create global and thread-local objects. As with all objects, global and thread-local objects are constructed at the beginning of their lifetimes and destructed at the end.

This talk will cover what the C++11 standard guarantees concerning global, static, and thread-local object lifetimes.  It will then cover what compilers actually do.  How to use global data for complex initialization will be discussed.  Patterns for dealing with global data and how to minimize global data will also be discussed.