Both gcc and clang support extensions to C and while i normally try and make things I write about work on Windows (i.e. Visual Studio), these are useful enough that I thought they deserve a mention. Yes I know you can run gcc/clang on Windows using Cygwin or MinGW, but for various reasons I prefer Visual Studio.

You can add a constructor and destructor functions to a C program; the constructor function runs before main() and the destructor after main().

The syntax is not exactly clean or obvious (those are double underscores before and after the word attribute like Python dunders!) but I got this program to compile/run with clang 10 on Ubuntu as the screenshot shows.  Here’s a listing. I called the two functions ctor and dtor but you can use anything.

#include <stdio.h>

__attribute__((constructor)) void ctor(void)
{
  printf("Constructor runs first\n");
}

__attribute__((destructor)) void dtor(void)
{
  printf("Destructor runs last\n");
}

int main() {
    printf("Main\n");
}

The output  is:

david@DavidPC:~/Projects/Examples$ ./ex1
Constructor runs first
Main
Destructor runs last