[Dean's rant on the evils of global variables deleted] > Given my extensive talks with Andy H on this subject both in the context of > the XML code and back at Taligent, I'm sure that I speak for him here as > well. >
I definitely concur with everything that Dean said. The portability problems that crop up from the fact that the order of construction of static objects varies with the tools, platform and build commands are awful and never ending. And different end-user applications that themselves use statics with constructors inadvertently introduce even more dependencies on an ever-varying set of probably-not-initialized-yet services. The only clean solution is to just not use statics or globals with C++ style constructors. (Plain old C initialized-to-zero style global variables are fine, as every system that I'm aware of gets all of these set before any user code of any kind runs.) If Xalan is depending on Xerces being alive and well at its (Xalan's) static construction time, we should figure out how to get rid of that dependency. -- Andy
