Global object and creation order

Question

I'm still learning C++. I have one problem. Lets say that your project has global object which always exists e.g ApiManager and all other modules have access to it (by #include). For now I'm doing it by:

Header:

class ApiManager : public QObject
{
    Q_OBJECT
public:
    explicit ApiManager(QObject *parent = 0);
signals:
public slots:
};

extern ApiManager apiMng;

Source:

ApiManager apiMng;

The problem is that other objects need to have access when initialized too and I noticed that C++ global objects are created alphabetically. I'm wondering how do you deal with it? Exists some trick for this? For example in Free Pascal world each class module has initialization and finalization sections:

Type
  TApiManager = class
end;

var ApiMng: TApiManager;

initialization
  ApiMng := TApiManager.Create;
finalization
  ApiMng.Free;

... and initialization order of project modules can be sorted in project source in uses clause (like #include in C++). I know that there is a lot of ways to do this (for example initialize everything in main.cpp with custom order) but want to know what is a "good habit" in C++ world

Edit: Solved by Q_GLOBAL_STATIC (introduced in Qt 5.1 but work for Qt 4.8 too) but still have two issues:

Still don't know how to manage constructor orders (and where to initialize it). Because global objects created by Q_GLOBAL_STATIC are not created at application startup. They are created on first usage. So I need to "touch" these object somewhere (in main.cpp?) with my custom order.
Documentation is saying that Q_GLOBAL_STATIC must be called in body .cpp file, not in header. But then other classes do not see this object. So I created static function which expose reference to this object:

.cpp:

Q_GLOBAL_STATIC(ApiManager, apiMng)
ApiManager *ApiManager::instance()
{
    return apiMng();
}

But from this topic: http://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/13977 Q_GLOBAL_STATIC should expose instance automatically, but it doesn't

Global object and creation order

3 Answers