Could someone please explain the difference in how the 2 snippets of code are handled below? They definitely compile to different assembly code, but I'm trying to understand how the code might act differently. I understand that string literals are thrown into read only memory and are effectively static, but how does that differ from the explicit static below? struct Obj1 { void Foo() { const char* str( "hello" ); } }; and struct Obj2 { void Bar() { static const char* str( "hello" ); } };