[couchand]

I guess I've personally never seen the value of static initializers (in other languages at least), they always seem like the source of hard-to-find bugs. So perhaps that's really where my complaint is. Is there a compelling use for them in Go over explicit initialization?

I suppose if the runtime randomizes things, at least you would never experience it consistently working in the first place, so maybe the issue wouldn't ever come up.

[skj]

Right, that's the idea.

Regarding static initializers, I use them for precompiling regexps and templates, but not much more than that.