That would probably be a better solution than what I mentioned above. Essentially it does the thing that we often said was possible, though we never did, which was to not actually initialize MPI_COMM_WORLD until we used it. In theory, that seemed like a good idea, but it wouldn't actually help anything because it would still require MPI_COMM_WORLD to be created sooner or later because everything gets created from it. On Oct 31, 2017, at 10:57 AM, Dinan, James <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: IIUC, this would break code that uses MPI_COMM_WORLD as a static initializer, e.g., to initialize a global variable like "MPI_Comm mycomm = MPI_COMM_WORLD". Why can't the handles themselves be compile-time constants corresponding to objects that are not created until the library is initialized (how it works now)? Note that such handles are defined to be compile-time constants. I don't know that they necessarily correspond to symbols that you can take an address of.