[jfr]

> The bitching about bad compile time errors has been mostly fixed in clang.

Yes, IOW, it is a compiler problem, not a language problem. Because one particular compiler is horrible on error presentation doesn't mean that the language is bad.

> declared somewhere with static linkage, it can be hard to pin down exactly _when_ that constructor will be called.

The language doesn't define it on purpose. The language leaves it to be defined by the implementation because it goes a little beyond the purpose of the compiler. The compiler transforms C++ source into object code. You can have multiple objects linked together into a single binary, and this linkage is very platform and operating-system dependent. C++ is already horribly difficult to implement correctly; if the language were to define an order for static initialization, it would be stepping on the operating system domain, and make it even more difficult to implement on some systems.