Friday, September 24, 2010

Thread-safe singleton in C++

The usual pattern for a singleton class is something like\

static Foo &getInst()
{
  static Foo *inst = NULL;
  if(inst == NULL)
    inst = new Foo(...);
  return *inst;    

}


However, it's my understanding that this solution is not thread-safe, since 1) Foo's constructor might be called more than once (which may or may not matter) and 2) inst may not be fully constructed before it is returned to a different thread.

One solution is to wrap a mutex around the whole method, but then I'm paying for synchronization overhead long after I actually need it. An alternative is something like

static Foo &getInst()
{
  static Foo *inst = NULL;
  if(inst == NULL)
  {
    pthread_mutex_lock(&mutex);
    if(inst == NULL)
      inst = new Foo(...);
    pthread_mutex_unlock(&mutex);
  }
  return *inst;    
}

If you are using C++11, here is a right way to do this:
Foo& getInst()
{
    static Foo inst(...);
    return inst;

}

Suggest if better methods available?