Re: singleton initialization

I created a singleton class as in the example below. The application
sporadically crashes in the second line of the main function as shown.
However, when I change the singleton such that the static pointer is a
class member (defined in the cpp file) and the instance function
creates the object if the pointer is NULL, then it works fine. I would
appreciate any explanations as to why this happens.

class CTestClass
{
public:
    static CTestClass& instance()
    {
        static CTestClass* m_instance = new CTestClass;

        return *m_instance;
    }
private:
    CTestClass() { /* do some stuff */ }
};

int main()
{
    CTestClass::instance(); // initialize singleton here to
avoid future race conditions
    // sporadically crashes here when using CTestClass::instance()
}