[fch42]

You needn't go "hacky" for this; constructors for global/static variables are called before main(). But then, the underlaying linker support is usually "trivially exposed" (using the constructor attribute in gcc/clang, say).

This (obviously?) isn't "110%" perfect as the order of the constructor calls for several such objects may not be well-defined, and were they to create threads (who am I to suggest being reasonable ...) you end up with chicken-egg situations again.

[hinkley]

JavaScript only just got top level async. So what I saw happen is that files that do their own background tasks start those either in their constructor or lazily in the case of static functions.

There was one place and only one place where we violated that, and it was in code I worked on. It was a low level module used everywhere else for bootstrapping, and so we collectively decided to do something sneaky in order to avoid making the entire code base async.

And while I find that most of the time people can handle making one special case for a rule, it was a complicated system and even “we” screwed it up occasionally for a good long while.

The problem was we needed to make a consul call at startup and the library didn’t have a synchronous way to make that call. So all bootstrapping code had to call a function and await it, before loading other things that used that module. At the end we had about a dozen entry points (services, dev and diagnostic tools). And I always got blamed because nobody seemed to remember we decided this together.

I hate singletons. And I ended up with one of only two in the whole project, and that hatred still wasn’t enough to prevent hitting the classical problems with singletons.