Singleton is a creational design pattern, which ensures that only one object of its kind exists and provides a single point of access to it for any other code.
Singleton has almost the same pros and cons as global variables. Although they’re super-handy, they break the modularity of your code.
You can’t just use a class that depends on Singleton in some other context. You’ll have to carry the Singleton class as well. Most of the time, this limitation comes up during the creation of unit tests.
It’s pretty easy to implement a sloppy Singleton. You just need to hide the constructor and implement a static creation method.
The same class behaves incorrectly in a multithreaded environment. Multiple threads can call the creation method simultaneously and get several instances of Singleton class.
main.rb: Conceptual example
# The Singleton class defines the `instance` method that lets clients access the
# unique singleton instance.
class Singleton
@instance = new
private_class_method :new
# The static method that controls the access to the singleton instance.
#
# This implementation let you subclass the Singleton class while keeping just
# one instance of each subclass around.
def self.instance
@instance
end
# Finally, any singleton should define some business logic, which can be
# executed on its instance.
def some_business_logic
# ...
end
end
# The client code.
s1 = Singleton.instance
s2 = Singleton.instance
if s1.equal?(s2)
print 'Singleton works, both variables contain the same instance.'
else
print 'Singleton failed, variables contain different instances.'
end
output.txt: Execution result
Singleton works, both variables contain the same instance.
Thread-safe Singleton
To fix the problem, you have to synchronize threads during the first creation of the Singleton object.
main.rb: Conceptual example
# The Singleton class defines the `intance` method that lets clients access the
# unique singleton instance.
class Singleton
attr_reader :value
@instance_mutex = Mutex.new
private_class_method :new
def initialize(value)
@value = value
end
# The static method that controls the access to the singleton instance.
#
# This implementation let you subclass the Singleton class while keeping just
# one instance of each subclass around.
def self.instance(value)
return @instance if @instance
@instance_mutex.synchronize do
@instance ||= new(value)
end
@instance
end
# Finally, any singleton should define some business logic, which can be
# executed on its instance.
def some_business_logic
# ...
end
end
# @param [String] value
def test_singleton(value)
singleton = Singleton.instance(value)
puts singleton.value
end
# The client code.
puts "If you see the same value, then singleton was reused (yay!)\n"\
"If you see different values, then 2 singletons were created (booo!!)\n\n"\
"RESULT:\n\n"
process1 = Thread.new { test_singleton('FOO') }
process2 = Thread.new { test_singleton('BAR') }
process1.join
process2.join
output.txt: Execution result
If you see the same value, then singleton was reused (yay!)
If you see different values, then 2 singletons were created (booo!!)
RESULT:
FOO
FOO
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