Is a bad practice to declare static variables into functions/member functions?

Question

Recently a fellow worker showed to me a code like this:

void SomeClass::function()
{
    static bool init = false;

    if (!init)
    {
        // hundreds          


        

Answer 1

Adding to what others said, you can't have multiple objects of this class at the same time, or at least would they not behave as expected. The first instance would set the static variable and do the initialization. The ones created later though would not have their own version of init but share it with all other instances. Since the first instance set it to true, all following won't do any initialization, which is most probably not what you want.