[lokar]

Also, don’t use automatic module init, make the user call an init function at startup.

And prefix everything in your library with a unique string.

[layer8]

What if you use two libraries A and B that both happen to use library C under the hood? Is the application expected to initialize all dependencies in the right order at the top level? Or is library initialization supposed to be idempotent?

This all works as long as libraries are “flat”, but doesn’t scale very well once libraries are built on top of each other and want to hide implementation details.

[lokar]

The call to init should be idempotent

[layer8]

That can be difficult in a multi-threaded environment with dynamically loaded shared libraries. Or at least it isn’t something that’s generally expected to be guaranteed to work.

[TuxSH]

C++ "magic statics" handle that use case (but with hidden atomic flag load (& more) costs at each access)

[lokar]

Ideally they would do the explicit init at startup before starting threads

[eyalitki]

Agree, there should be a prefix. But if 2 of my dependencies didn't use a prefix, why is it my fault when I fail to link against them?

Also, some managers object to a prefix within non-api functions, and frankly I can understand them.