The constexpr static instances can cause linking failures if the
compiler doesn't optimize away the reference, as reported in #770.

There's no particularly nice way of fixing this in C++11/14: we can't
inline definitions to match the declaration aren't permitted for
non-templated static variables (C++17 *does* allows "inline" on
variables, but that obviously doesn't help us.)

One solution that could work around it is to add an extra inherited
subclass to `object`'s hierarchy, but that's a bit of a messy solution
and was decided against in #771 in favour of just deprecating (and
eventually dropping) the constexpr statics.

Fixes #770.