Comment by Animats
2 days ago
It's something of an issue if you have some crate that needs to set itself up at load time without a call from main. But those are very rare. Even "simplelog" needs a call at startup to do anything.
2 days ago
It's something of an issue if you have some crate that needs to set itself up at load time without a call from main. But those are very rare. Even "simplelog" needs a call at startup to do anything.
Yeah, I think of avoiding the call from main as a devex consideration rather than a performance one, since either way the initialization code runs once at process startup.
But it can cause problems when there's multiple crates trying to do it. If the call is explicit, the application developer can sequence the calls appropriately (or at least deterministically), as opposed to having the order determined by details of the implementation (something that was learned from the C++ 'static initialization order fiasco')
I'm trying to think of any useful crate that really uses this. "Tracy", the profiling crate, used to self-start on loading, but that was changed to require a call to get it going.