On 05/23/2011 08:42 PM, Sanatan Rai wrote: > On 23 May 2011 17:46, Michael Hertling <mhertl...@online.de> wrote:
>> In summary, this whole issue is not related to C++ or even to CMake, >> but to the manner static libraries are handled: The linker - at least >> the GNU one - picks out entire object files, or drops them if they are >> not referred to. This is something one must keep in mind, particularly >> when dealing with global objects for initialisation purposes. BTW, also >> keep in mind that the order of initialisations, i.e. constructor calls, >> among global objects is unspecified; this might become important when >> such global objects refer to each other. > > I do realise that it was off-topic, but people very kindly offered > suggestions! > So one had to go on! > > Many thanks to all for a careful and useful discussion. Please don't get me wrong on this point: Far be it from me to criticise your concern as off-topic; on a build system's mailing list, it rather isn't, IMO. Instead, I just wanted to point out that this issue is not immediately related to CMake or C++ but to the implications of static libraries. Of course, we can frankly discuss it here, especially how to address it with the means of CMake. > Unfortunately, I am stuck with the paradigm of having to kludge loading an > entire library. For various reasons the one may not have a reference to > the hosted object in main, which must remain agnostic. Indeed, in my > particular > line of business (finance), this happens to be a `standard' pattern. > Whether good or bad is a discussion that'd be too off topic...(though am happy > to continue the discussion off/on list if people are so inclined!). In this thread, you have spoken about "loading a library", "library loaded when needed" and "library loaded in memory", e.g., but static libraries aren't loaded in this sense; they're examined at link time, and that's it. May it be possible that shared libraries are what you actually want, i.e. is there any reason why the libraries in question must be static? Note that shared libraries don't have the limitations of static ones; say, they are not "cherry-picked" w.r.t. object files. If you really want to have actions performed at the program's startup without any explicit ado, you might take a look at GCC's constructor/ destructor attributes, but be aware that this is highly dependent on the underlying binary format and the corresponding development tools. Regards, Michael _______________________________________________ Powered by www.kitware.com Visit other Kitware open-source projects at http://www.kitware.com/opensource/opensource.html Please keep messages on-topic and check the CMake FAQ at: http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake_FAQ Follow this link to subscribe/unsubscribe: http://www.cmake.org/mailman/listinfo/cmake
