persistence of inline static class members set within "initialization" function

[kaschau]

I am a poor man's c++ user, so please be patient with any ignorance I display here.

I use pybind11 to create bindings between Kokkos views (the details of Kokkos are not terribly important, but a view is an abstract data container for portable (CPU/GPU) programming). This has worked great in the past. However, before using any Kokkos functionality, a void returning initializer function in Kokkos must be called. Easy enough, I wrap the Kokkos::initialize() function with pybind11, call it from the beginning of my python program, and all is well.

Recently, the Kokkos devs changed many of the class members created/set by the Kokkos::initialize() function to inline static members, and this has broken my use case with pybind11. A more detailed example:

Kokkos::initialize() creates a Kokkos defined cuda implementation class; call it KokkosCudaImpl, with an inline static member m_maxThreadsPerSM which gets set from a cuda library call. In the class definition:

class KokkosCudaImpl{
// stuff
inline static int m_maxThreadsPerSM = 0;
// more stuff
};

When Kokkos::initialize() is called, I see that the value pulled from the CUDA library for m_maxThreadsPerSM is 1024, and is supposed to be used to set the m_maxThreadsPerSM member of the KokkosCudaImpl. However, when I go to use more features of Kokkos, like execute a compute kernel, the m_maxThreadsPerSM of the KokkosCudaImpl class is set back to 0, and the kernel aborts with an error.

My question is really, should this work? As in, I call a c++ function from python that returns nothing, and expect the static class members set within that function to be persistent throughout the program execution?

Thanks for the help.