Hands-On Design Patterns with C++

Leaky singletons

We have just seen how Meyers' singleton solves the problem of the order of static initializations. The problem of the destruction order, on the other hand, is a different matter altogether. The order of destruction is well-defined by the standard—the static variables—the ones at the function scope, as well as the ones at the file scope—are destroyed after the program itself terminates (after the return from main()). The destruction is done in the opposite order to that of construction; that is, the object that was constructed last is destroyed first. Why is this a concern?

First of all, we can say with certainty that any references to a singleton object in the program itself (and not in other static objects) are definitely ...