What happens before main()?

What happens before main()?

Perhaps someone can explain it succintly and perhaps
someone has a link where it is described? crt0.lib or
something like that comes to mind (surely I have the
source code to that given that I have a number of
compilers (some very old) but I'd rather get some
rough idea first of what's happening there). Is it just
setting up an environment in which the C++ library
will work? What happens from the time a program
is started (typing the name on the command line and
pressing enter, for example) until it starts initializing
application program objects and then ending up at main()?

Tony

re: What happens before main()?

Tony wrote:It's implementation defined.

re: What happens before main()?

Tony wrote:Construction of static objects defined at the namespace
level happens. Everything else is implementation-defined.
Perhaps.
Yes. Probably. In your system, that is.
That's up to the hosting environment and beyond the scope
of this newsgroup.

V
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re: What happens before main()?

Noah Roberts wrote:Implementation-specific, but not implementation-defined. The latter is a
technical term in the C++ standard. It requires that the implementation
document its behavior.

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-- Pete
Roundhouse Consulting, Ltd. (www.versatilecoding.com)
Author of "The Standard C++ Library Extensions: a Tutorial and
Reference." (www.petebecker.com/tr1book)

re: What happens before main()?

Victor Bazarov wrote:What about static objects at the class level? Is that different?

re: What happens before main()?

"Victor Bazarov" <v.Abazarov@comAcast.netwrote in message
news:FIKdncXpibc8EerYnZ2dnUVZ_rWdnZ2d@comcast.com. ..Sounds like something I may be hacking on at some time.
Maybe all that is necessary is the static initialization and
main() is too specialized for a specific paradigm (the UNIX
filter type of program).

Tony

re: What happens before main()?

Noah Roberts wrote:The definition of a class's static data member has to appear at
namespace scope so Victor's statement implicitly includes static data
members.

Gavin Deane