> <i>There was this Oregon company - Mentor Graphics, I think they were called - really caught a cold trying to rewrite everything in C++ in about ‘90 or '91.</i><p>This reminded me of the very first industry conference I attended as a kid, Usenix C++ 1992, from where I seemed to recall a talk about Mentor dealing with static initializer costs. :)<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/1992-proceedings-c-portland/page/170/mode/2up" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/1992-proceedings-c-portland/page...</a><p>I remembered that paper about a decade later, when a related problem came up in an interview at a company developing a new Web-oriented programming language, when they were talking technical about how they do program loading. It turned out they had indeed anticipated and/or run into that, and had a clever solution for it, and seemed impressed that I'd asked about it (thanks to the Usenix C++ paper by John F. Reiser from Mentor Graphics).