This is an unofficial snapshot of the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC22 WG21 Core Issues List revision 116a. See http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/ for the official list.

2024-12-19

174. Undeprecating global static

Section: _N3225_.D.2  [depr.static]     Status: NAD     Submitter: Lawrence Crowl     Date: 25 Oct 1999

The decision to deprecate global static should be reversed.

  1. We cannot deprecate static because it is an important part of C and to abandon it would make C++ unnecessarily incompatible with C.
  2. Because templates may be instantiated on members of unnamed namespaces, some compilation systems may place such symbols in the global linker space, which could place a significant burden on the linker. Without static, programmers have no mechanism to avoid the burden.

Rationale (04/00):

This issue, along with issue 167, has been subsumed by issue 223. Until the committee determines the meaning of deprecation, it does not make sense either to extend or reduce the number of features to which it is applied.