In C, all statics can only be initialized with compile-time constants. Thus, they can all be initialized before anything in the program starts running (indeed, there's no code initializing them in most implementations - they are just bytes in the data segment).

In C++, initializers can be arbitrary expressions, which means that an initializer for a global variable can spawn a thread, and that thread might still be running when another global is being initialized with a different expression that is not a compile-time constant. There are no thread safety guarantees wrt those kinds of conflicts, for either globals or locals. But for static locals with runtime initializers, the evaluation of initializer is deferred until execution actually reaches the definition of that variable - and thus C++ has a special provision for thread-safe synchronization if that happens on two different threads concurrently.

you forget the dlopen case :)

Only in C++11 onwards.