Static object's constructor not being called

Question

I have a header file which defines two objects:

// header.h
static A object1("param1", "param2");
static A object2("param1", "param2");

This is how A looks like:

class A {
    public:
    int random;
    A(char* p1, char* p2){
        printf("Called constructor for %s | %s\n", p1, p2);
    }
};

However, the constructor is never getting called. I'm doing this:

#include "header.h"

int main(){
    // to prevent optimization issues
    object1.random = rand();
    if (object1.random != 3) { printf("\n"); }
    return 0;
}

And I never see the messages on the console, it just remains empty.

I've read about the static initialization order fiasco, but I believe it's not the problem here, because neither of those objects is relying on the other one, so order doesn't really matter...

I'm using MSVC++ 2013 on Windows 7 x64

Answer 1

When are static C++ class members initialized? contains a great answer about this topic.

In short there are 3 guarantees (citing the original Tadeusz Kopec answer in the above mentioned question):

1. Objects defined in the same translation unit (usually it means .cpp file) are initialized in order of their definitions
2. Initialization of static objects from a translation unit will be done before use of any object or function from this translation unit
3. They will be initialized before main is entered.

If in your specific case static variables object1 and object2 were not initialized this could be related to a compiler optimization omitting the initialization of unused variables. You can verify this easily by adding a usage of these variables inside main and observe whether these got initialized and when.