Statistics should be fast enough that we can enable them in release builds without compiletime impact. This does not work today because the lazy initialization in use today puts a memory fence on every increment operation!
The obvious solution for this is initializing the statistic variable in the constructor. Which is easy to do and works better in every way than todays code IMO except that introduce additional static constructors into llvm which in this specific instance look fine to me; the alternative of forbidding global variables for statistic variables appears arguably worse.