How to force inclusion of "unused" object definitions in a library

There's the linker option /OPT:REF and /OPT:NOREF, accessed through linker->optimization->references.

After a lot of head-scratching and trying ugly hacks, I ended up making my library dynamic (shared). That fixed the issue

Well, the other answers where good attempts but ultimately fruitless. I am going to use the refit trick but the rest appears to have been a red herring; it kind of makes sense since the template in question isn't actually used anywhere else so the fact that it's not explicitly instantiated shouldn't make a difference...the declaration of the global still happens in A translation unit, it has side effects...I don't think the standard allows it to be optimized away.

The unfortunate bit about the standard not saying whether or not it is required to include a translation unit at all is the ultimate issue. I think C++0x is doing something about this but maybe not... At any rate, MS feels free to not include the unit at all, and since it doesn't the global isn't ultimately included in the executable and thus none of the other crap happens.

What I've decided to do, and there are of course many other ways, is to create a file 'tag' variable. That tag is then assigned to in a function that is globally accessible (it HAS to assign or assign from or the reference is optimized away). Then that function has to be called from the executable.

I decided to do it this way because then the rest still works the same as it always has. I don't end up ultimately changing behavior like I could if I simply wrote a registration function that hand-registered the types. Plus I can do other things this way...I just have to make sure that anything that might fall into this classification of fucktardery has a tag and that tag is accessed.

I'll be writing a bunch of helper macros to make this mostly painless.