C++ static global non-POD: theory and practice

Question

I was reading the Qt coding conventions docs and came upon the following paragraph:

Anything that has a constructor or needs to run code to be initialized

Answer 1

The "not at all" part simply says that the C++ standard is silent about this issue. It doesn't know about shared libraries and thus doesn't says anything about the interaction of certain C++ features with these.

In practice, I have seen global non-POD static globals used on Windows, OSX, and many versions of Linux and other Unices, both in GUI and command line programs, as plugins and as standalone applications. At least one project (which used non-POD static globals) had versions for the full set of all combinations of these. The only problem I have ever seen was that some very old GCC version generated code that called the dtors of such objects in dynamic libraries when the executable stopped, not when the library was unloaded. Of course, that was fatal (the library code was called when the library was already gone), but that has been almost a decade ago.

But of course, this still doesn't guarantee anything.