What’s so bad about the Singleton?

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By bloid
via sitepoint.com
Published: Feb 15 2008 / 11:13

It’s a good question, for it is true that global variables are often demonised and more recently the Singleton has befallen the same fate. Perhaps a bit surprising, it is remarkably hard to find good arguments to support this common knowledge — Googling turns up a lot of confusion.

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daniel replied ago:

2 votes

I think his conclusion is absolutely wrong, but it's a good article. Singletons (properly applied) are a way to *reduce* coupling, not increase it. Global state is a fact of life in imperative languages. Unless you want to write things completely functionally, you will have to deal with side-effects at some point. Using global state wrapped within a singleton gives you a way to mitigate the consequences of such side-effects and avoid code duplication.