Personally, I think global's with constructors are kind of an anti pattern. I've noticed a high correlation between crappy app's and app's with a lot of pre main() code. Especially if some of your global's have threads: because then you potentially have threads running AFTER main exits... I've seen a number of apps with random crashes at shutdown because a thread that was started in a global was still running and since main returned globals were being cleaned up and the thread used something that had just been cleaned up.