sb> William Perry <wmperry(a)aventail.com&gt; writes in xemacs-beta(a)xemacs.org: sb> Based on past experiences with egcs/the new gcc. Constructor stuff sb> can get called before main() and before we have a chance to take any sb> of our usual precautions. I don't fully understand the technical sb> details, but it was giving me corrupted memory and when I asked one of sb> the now-gcc maintainers about how to turn off global constructors, sb> explaining briefly XEmacs startup & dumping, I was told that dumping sb> was stupid and deserved to lose. This issue only applies to global objects. Global objects are rarely used (and never needed). The design pattern "singleton" is made to address this. There's no big magic to the gcc implementation of global constructors on any architecture I am familiar with. I'm not sure what the details of your issue were, but I'll bet it's not difficult to fix. I have so far kept my $0.02 out of this, but personally if I had to write any GUI I would certainly not want to use a C API. I would much rather use a C++ API, particularly a professionally implemented one like QT.