Statics in templates - a bug in VC?
My problem is that I have a template-based factory. The idea is that classes plug themselves in. To be able to do this the factory is a singleton and you access the one instance through an instance()-method.
Initially my instance()-method looked something like this:
Code:
generic_factory<ProdType, ClassID> &instance()
{
static generic_factory<ProdType, ClassID> self;
return self;
}
But that didn't work when I compiled it in release-mode (worked alright in debug-mode and in GCC though).
Now I have a static auto_ptr to the instance in the class body instead. Since the class is a template the auto_ptr must be initialised in the header that contains the factory (this would cause a linker-error if the class wasn't a template).
My problem is now that the factory is created more than once (and I guess it depends on the above paragraph), so some classes that register may be lost.
Which classes get lost seems to depend on the compilation order, but I can't see how my class-hierarchy is dependant on the order of static initialisations across translation-units.
I also wrote a similar class-hierarchy (for debugging) where I instatiated the template with a builtin type (int) and everything worked as it should. When I instantiated it with a type of my own (a class) it exhibited the same problem as the factory.
I've attached a workspace that exhibits the problem (includes all the relevant source-files).
I'm sorry for the long and incoherent post, but it isn't easy to explain this.
/Andreas
