Re: singleton initialization

From:
John Moeller <fishcorn@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Tue, 15 May 2007 22:24:17 CST
Message-ID:
<f2dr1u$f5$1@news.xmission.com>
Eric wrote:

I created a singleton class as in the example below. The application
sporadically crashes in the second line of the main function as shown.
However, when I change the singleton such that the static pointer is a
class member (defined in the cpp file) and the instance function
creates the object if the pointer is NULL, then it works fine. I would
appreciate any explanations as to why this happens.

class CTestClass
{
public:
    static CTestClass& instance()
    {
        static CTestClass* m_instance = new CTestClass;
        return *m_instance;
    }
private:
    CTestClass() { /* do some stuff */ }
};


I'm not sure if you're attempting to use a "Meyers Singleton," which is
very similar to what you are doing here, but that style singleton just
constructs the object locally, instead of allocating it on the heap:

....
    static CTestClass & instance()
    {
        static CTestClass m_instance;
        return m_instance;
    }
....

int main()
{
    CTestClass::instance(); // initialize singleton here to
avoid future race conditions
    // sporadically crashes here when using CTestClass::instance()
}


It's a memory leak (there's no matching delete, not that it matters with
singletons most of the time, though it can), and constructing it locally
will solve that.

I can't claim to know why your program crashes, however. I tried
running your original program repeatedly on my platform, and no such
crash happened. It may be that your platform dislikes leaked memory.

--

John Moeller
fishcorn@gmail.com

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