Anthony Williams wrote:
Tobias Schwinger <tschwinger <at> isonews2.com> writes:
I've written code that used singletons (and regretted it later), and used code that other people have written containing singletons. So you should like this library: The design chosen allows you to easily substitute Singletons with Smart Pointers. I disagree. If people know something is a singleton, then they don't bother keep the reference around, as they can get it again later. Changing code that does that to code that can use a passed in instance requires adding parameters and/or storing references. You can't just change uses of a singleton to use a smart pointer instead without thought to *how* it's being used. I won't argue on this one. I can imagine that having to refactor a mess
Anthony Williams wrote: like this is a most unpleasant experience.
Still it's not the fault of the Singletons but of developer's laziness: At least the developers in the project you mention had a choice whether to write flexible code or not. With globals and static functions, they wouldn't have had a choice but to make a mess.
Singletons *are* globals.
OK, that was a bit unclear. Let's put it this way: It's not globals that are evil but accessing them all over the place (or "coupling" to use the technical term that describes the problem). Regards, Tobias