For a while I was very interested in the singleton pattern, and even worked with people on the Boost developers list to try to develop a generic singleton library.  Unfortunately, as I added more and more features the library became unwieldly and eventually had to be scrapped.  However, the process of working on it taught me a great deal about what the standard has to say about the lifetimes of global objects.

This paper is based on a presentation I gave to our software class during our second term at the Guildhall.  It describes how to implement and support a generic vertex structure without excessive code duplication by taking advantage of template metaprogramming techniques.