[webkit-dev] Pattern for singleton classes instance getters

[Maciej Stachowiak]

This may be a question of what jargon we’ve encountered, but to me, “singleton" clearly means "the one unique instance of this class" while “instance" means "any instance of this class". If I hadn’t seen this thread, I would interpret Class::instance() to mean “create a brand new instance of this class” rather than “return the unique singleton instance of this class, creating if necessary".

Regards,
Maciej

> On Jan 28, 2015, at 8:54 PM, Chris Dumez <cdumez at apple.com> wrote:
> 
> Yes, instance() is what I’ve seen mostly outside WebKit as well. This would be my preference.
> 
> Kr,
> --
> Chris Dumez - Apple Inc.
> Cupertino, CA
> 
>> On Jan 28, 2015, at 8:44 PM, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro at igalia.com <mailto:mcatanzaro at igalia.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 8:11 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com <mailto:mjs at apple.com>> wrote:
>>> Yet another possibility is finding a better name than ‘shared’ for the singleton pattern function, but I don’t have any better ideas. Class::getSingleton() is more explicit but the extra verbosity doesn’t seem helpful to me.
>> 
>> I recommend Class::instance(), which is what I've seen used almost exclusively outside of WebKit. It's what Scott Meyers used, and it's very similar to the Gang of Four's choice of Class::Instance() and the Java pattern Class.INSTANCE.
>> 
>> That said, Class::singleton() is very attractive too.
>> 
>> I've never seen Class::shared() used anywhere except WebKit. The first time I saw this I had no clue what it was until I looked up the implementation.
>> 
>> All of these can get quite annoying to type, especially when the name of the class is long. (Sometimes I will keep a reference to the instance in a local variable with a shorter name.) But I think they're easier to read than free functions, and we should optimize for reading code, not writing it. Not a big deal either way.
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