97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

Chapter 73. Resist the Temptation of the Singleton Pattern

Sam Saariste

THE SINGLETON PATTERN SOLVES MANY OF YOUR PROBLEMS. You know that you only need a single instance. You have a guarantee that this instance is initialized before it’s used. It keeps your design simple by having a global access point. It’s all good. What’s not to like about this classic design pattern?

Quite a lot, it turns out. Tempting they may be, but experience shows that most singletons really do more harm than good. They hinder testability and harm maintainability. Unfortunately, this additional wisdom is not as widespread as it should be, and singletons continue to be irresistible to many programmers. But they are worth resisting:

• The single-instance requirement is often imagined. In many cases, it’s pure speculation that no additional instances will be needed in the future. Broadcasting such speculative properties across an application’s design is bound to cause pain at some point. Requirements will change. Good design embraces this. Singletons don’t.

• Singletons cause implicit dependencies between conceptually independent units of code. This is problematic both because they are hidden and because they introduce unnecessary coupling between units. This code smell becomes pungent when you try to write unit tests, which depend on loose coupling and the ability to selectively substitute a mock implementation for ...