08-12-11 - The standard cinit trick

Sometimes I like to write down standard tricks that I believe are common knowledge but are rarely written down.

Say you have some file that does some "cinit" (C++ class constructors called before main) time work. A common example is like a factory that registers itself at cinit time.

The problem is if nobody directly calls anything in that file, it will get dropped by the linker. That is, if all uses are through the factory or function pointers or something like that, the linker doesn't know it gets called that way and so drops the whole thing out.

The standard solution is to put a reference to the file in its header. Something like this :

Example.cpp :

int example_cpp_force = 0;

AT_STARTUP( work I wanted to do );


Example.h :

extern int example_cpp_force;

AT_STARTUP( example_cpp_force = 1 );

where AT_STARTUP is just a helper that puts the code into a class so that it runs at cinit, it looks like this :

#define AT_STARTUP(some_code)   \
namespace { static struct STRING_JOIN(AtStartup_,__LINE__) { \
STRING_JOIN(AtStartup_,__LINE__)() { some_code; } } STRING_JOIN( NUMBERNAME(AtStartup_) , Instance ); };

Now Example.obj will be kept in the link if any file that includes Example.h is kept in the link.

This works so far as I know, but it's not really ideal (for one thing, if Example.h is included a lot, you get a whole mess of little functions doing example_cpp_force = 1 in your cinit). This is one of those dumb little problems that I wish the C standards people would pay more attention to. What we really want is a way within the code file to say "hey never drop this file from link, it has side effects", which you can do in certain compilers but not portably.