A while ago, I stumbled upon this 2001 DDJ article by Alexandrescu: http://www.ddj.com/cpp/184403799
It\'s about comparing various ways to initialize
You can take a look on liboil, they (try to) provide different implementation of the same function and choosing the fastest on initialization. Liboil has a pretty liberal licence, so you can take it also for proprietary software.
http://liboil.freedesktop.org/