Question

Is there a way to force a class to be instantiated on the stack or at least prevent it to be global in C++?

I want to prevent global instantiation because the constructor calls C APIs that need previous initialization. AFAIK there is no way to control the construction order of global objects.

Edit: The application targets an embedded device for which dynamic memory allocation is also prohibited. The only possible solution for the user to instanciate the class is either on the stack or through a placement new operator.

Edit2: My class is part of a library which depends on other external libraries (from which come the C APIs). I can’t modify those libraries and I can’t control the way libraries are initialized in the final application, that’s why I am looking for a way to restrict how the class could be used.

Answer 1

Instead of placing somewhat arbitrary restrictions on objects of your class I’d rather make the calls to the C API safe by wrapping them into a class. The constructor of that class would do the initialization and the destructor would release acquired resources.

Then you can require this class as an argument to your class and initialization is always going to work out.

The technique used for the wrapper is called RAII and you can read more about it in this SO question and this wiki page. It originally was meant to combine encapsulate resource initialization and release into objects, but can also be used for a variety of other things.