[monocasa]

I had a really good experience designing an RTOS initialization system that both depended on static initialization, but didn't have issues with ordering either (and in fact didn't even have a main, post init just went right into the idle thread).

Basically I only let children of one class be statically initialized (and enforced this with a tool that goes through the generated binary and type information). These 'subsystem' classes then gets callbacks after all of the static initializers have run which allows them to find the other subsystems they depend on, and then that dependency graph is walked to initialize the full system (the dependency graph has to be a DAG or the system faults). Combined with a code review rule that static initializations only happen in one compilation unit in an anonymous namespace, and nothing else can happen there, means that no one can really touch other subsystems before they've all been initialized, and therefore the order doesn't matter.

I was really happy with how it turned out, despite being completely off the wall compared to how C++ normally works.

[pnathan]

> despite being completely off the wall

embedded systems software in one phrase. :-D