Re: Singletons

From:
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=D6=F6_Tiib?= <ootiib@hot.ee>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Wed, 5 Dec 2012 23:07:00 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID:
<b06d8100-ea00-4347-9099-4fdc6bd2b79d@googlegroups.com>
On Wednesday, 5 December 2012 16:19:25 UTC+2, Seungbeom Kim wrote:

On 2012-11-30 10:08, Alexander Terekhov wrote:

Seungbeom Kim wrote:

Can you give some real-world examples of the need for the
initialization to be lazy, i.e. not earlier than the first use?


There are lot of cases where you can benefit from lazy initialization.
For example optional module ... say some search engine, dictionary or
spell-checker. You load it only if user actually does something where
that thing participates and so you save time and space. Lazyness is
not property of singletons, it is one of tools to achieve smooth
performance with anything.

My understanding is that when you think of singletons as global
objects, you shouldn't mind their initialization being earlier
than their first use.


The things are unrelated. If initializing something that is likely
never used takes several seconds then it makes sense to delay its
initialization until it is more probable that it will be actually
used.

To begin with, search the usage of pthread_once() on the net for
examples.


Sorry, but I don't get how pthread_once() answers my question.
Can you be more specific, please?


He meant yet-another popular way of initializing single state lazily:

  static IOneOfKind* theState = nullptr;

  IOneOfKind* IOneOfKind::getInstance()
  {
      static pthread_once_t control;
      pthread_once( control, initTheState );
      return theState;
  }

That does not answer your "why?" because it answers to "how?".

If the product you make is of any use then real soon they request
more. Single player? But we want to multiplay! Single view?
But we have three monitors! etc. Then the code with dependency
injection is reusable but the code full of getInstance()s has to be
thrown away and written anew. So ... if you like to write things
anew (who doesnt?) then use Singletons. ;)

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