This leads to the beautiful property that they can be potentially evaluated and initialized at compile time. The lifetime of static variables doesn’t depend on the execution: they always exist forever no matter what. Such variables have static storage duration.

Global (namespace) variables or static class members 1 live for the entire execution of the program: they must be initialized before main() is run and destroyed after execution finishes. There is, however, a category of variables that can (and should) be initialized before the program starts: static variables. The compiler has little chance to initialize such variables before execution starts: How is it supposed to know what arguments will be passed to a function?, or if a given code block will be reached? The answers may even vary from execution to execution, so their initialization and destruction must happen on demand, at runtime, dynamically. variables that are initialized and destroyed at runtime: local (block-scope) variables, function arguments, non-static class members, etc. Most of the time the compiler must deal with dynamic variables, i.e. Static VariablesĪs the compiler translates your program it must decide how to deal with variables introduced: When should a variable be initialized? What’s the initial value? When should it be destroyed? Today I’m here to tell you that there is more to it. It’s a problem too essential to ignore but too challenging to master. Anyone who has been doing this long enough knows that variable initialization is everything but trivial. This means that you have battled frustration mastering auto deduction rules or lost your sanity trying to understand why std::initializer_list was considered a good idea. You are probably reading this because you code in C++. Today I think silly is the one who doesn’t. Growing up, I used to consider it silly to wear yellow underwear on new year’s eve. People say it shall bring wealth, luck and happiness for the upcoming twelve months.

I’m wearing my yellow underwear it’s a new year’s tradition in this part of the world.

Codeblocks compiler in use forever