C++ Equivalent to Designated Initializers?

Building on Shing Yip's answer, and with benefit of 3 year's time, C++11 can now guarantee compile time initialization:

union Bar
{
    constexpr Bar(int a) : a_(a) {}
    constexpr Bar(float b) : b_(b) {}
    int a_;
    float b_;
};

extern constexpr Bar bar1(1);
extern constexpr Bar bar2(1.234f);

Assembly:

    .globl  _bar1                   ## @bar1
    .p2align    2
_bar1:
    .long   1                       ## 0x1

    .globl  _bar2                   ## @bar2
    .p2align    2
_bar2:
    .long   1067316150              ## float 1.23399997

#ifdef __cplusplus
struct Foo
{
    Foo(int a, int b) : a(a), b(b) {}
    int a;
    int b;
};

union Bar
{
    Bar(int a) : a(a) {}
    Bar(float b) : b(b) {}
    int a;
    float b;
};

static Foo foo(1,2);
static Bar bar1(1);
static Bar bar2(1.234f);
#else 
 /* C99 stuff */
#endif // __cplusplus

In C++ union can have constructors too. May be this is what you wanted?

I'm not sure you can do it in C++. For the stuff that you need to initialize using designated initializers, you can put those separately in a .c file compiled as C99, e.g.:

// In common header file
typedef union my_union
{
    int i;
    float f;
} my_union;

extern const my_union g_var;

// In file compiled as C99
const my_union g_var = { .f = 3.14159f };

// Now any file that #include's the header can access g_var, and it will be
// properly initialized at load time