Design Patterns in Modern C++20: Reusable Approaches for Object-Oriented Software Design

© Dmitri Nesteruk 2022

D. NesterukDesign Patterns in Modern C++20https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7295-4_5

5. Singleton

Dmitri Nesteruk¹  

(1)

St. Petersburg, Russia

 

When discussing which patterns to drop, we found that we still love them all. (Not really – I'm in favor of dropping Singleton. Its use is almost always a design smell.)

—Erich Gamma

The Singleton is the most hated design pattern in the (rather limited) history of design patterns. Just stating that, however, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use the singleton: a toilet brush is not the most pleasant device either, but sometimes it’s simply necessary.

The Singleton design pattern grew out of a very simple idea that you should only have one instance of a particular component in your application. ...