[lldb-dev] Use of function local statics

[Greg Clayton]

> On Aug 20, 2014, at 2:36 PM, Zachary Turner <zturner at google.com> wrote:
> 
> As part of my moving code from Host to HostInfo, I moved some function-local statics to global class-member statics.  The reason for this is that MSVC doesn't support thread-safe function local statics until VS2014, which is still only in technology preview, whereas LLVM, clang, and by extension LLDB support building as far back as VS2012.
> 
> Greg submitted r216080 to convert these global statics back to function-local statics, but this had a bug in it which broke things for all platforms, so I reverted it in r216123.  A simple fix would have just been to address the bug, but my original transition from function-local statics to global statics was intentional due to the fact that any use of them on a non-primitive type is undefined behavior on MSVC.
> 
> So, I want to see if people have a strong preference one way or the other.  If the issue is just silencing the compiler warning that clang gives about global constructors, then we can do that in CMake and/or the Xcode project.  On the other hand, I understand that global static constructors increase application startup times.  Is this a concern for anyone?  If so, I can try to come up with a solution.  I think if we try to keep the use of statics to a minimum, and make sure that they are generally simple types (e.g std::string, which simply does a malloc), then there should be no noticeable performance impact on startup.
> 
> Thoughts?

For our build submissions here at Apple we need to keep the number of global constructors to a minimum. We need to apply for exceptions for each global constructor that is added to a shared library or framework. This is the main reason for the change I made. global constructors are fine for apps and they get to make that decision, but for shared libraries, they should be avoided if possible.

I would suggest using std::once for any issues you run into:

static std::once_flag g_once_flag;
std::call_once(g_once_flag, [](){
    // Insert code here to run once in a thread safe way
});