Some time ago I attended a job interview for C# developer position in Warsaw. One of the tasks that I had to perform was to implement a singleton pattern in C#. With a bit of help from my interviewer (I didn’t get a cup of coffee that morning) I arrived at a solution:

public class Singleton { private static Singleton _instance = null ; private static object _lock = new object (); public static Singleton Instance { get { if ( _instance == null ) { lock ( _lock ) { if ( _instance == null ) { _instance = new Singleton (); } } } return _instance ; } } private Singleton () { Console . WriteLine ( "Singleton()" ); } public void DoJob () { Console . WriteLine ( "Singleton::DoJob()" ); } }

We both admitted that this was a good enough solution and we moved to other questions.

Later the same day I had some spare time at launch break so I started to think about my solution again. Is it really the best way to create singletons in C#, I asked myself. As it happens answer to my question was contained on “C# in Depth” book accompanying website. There Jon Skeet commented on above solution:

Without any memory barriers, it’s broken in the ECMA CLI specification too. It’s possible that under the .NET 2.0 memory model (which is stronger than the ECMA spec) it’s safe, but I’d rather not rely on those stronger semantics, especially if there’s any doubt as to the safety. Making the instance variable volatile can make it work, as would explicit memory barrier calls, although in the latter case even experts can’t agree exactly which barriers are required. I tend to try to avoid situations where experts don’t agree what’s right and what’s wrong! – Jon Skeet

In practice this means that it is not strictly required by .NET specification that this implementation should work. Currently it works on .NET standard, and I guess Microsoft folks will also make sure that it works on .NET Core - but we cannot be 100% sure.

In the same article Jon Skeet proposes a better pattern:

public sealed class Singleton { public static Singleton Instance { get { return Nested . instance ; } } private class Nested { // Explicit static constructor to tell C# compiler // not to mark type as beforefieldinit static Nested () { } internal static readonly SingletonC instance = new Singleton (); } private Singleton () { Console . WriteLine ( "Singleton()" ); } }

This works because if a type provides a static constructor, C# will run static initializers lazily (on a first call to any method, including constructors or access to any field). Without static constructor runtime may invoke static initializers at any point in time prior to the first access to any type member. In practice it means that our singleton without empty static constructor in Nested class is no longer lazy.

So it looks like the cure is worse than the disease. Now we require that any person that implements singletons in our codebase knows about beforefieldinit attribute, which unfortunately is clearly visible only in CIL bytecode and is responsible for the above behaviour:

// without static constructor Nested class is declared in CIL // as follows: . class nested private auto ansi beforefieldinit Nested extends [ mscorlib ] System . Object { ... } // and with static constructor we get: . class nested private auto ansi Nested extends [ mscorlib ] System . Object { ... }

Also our version 2.0 doesn’t protect us from forming cyclic dependency between singletons:

public sealed class SingletonC { // singleton stuff... private SingletonC () { Console . WriteLine ( "SingletonC()" ); Console . WriteLine ( "D: " + SingletonD . Instance ); } } public sealed class SingletonD { // singleton stuff... private SingletonD () { Console . WriteLine ( "SingletonD()" ); Console . WriteLine ( "C: " + SingletonC . Instance ); } } public static void Main () { Console . WriteLine ( "Main()" ); var tmp = SingletonC . Instance ; } // Program output: // Main() // SingletonC() // SingletonD() // C: (null) // D: SingletonD

As we can see SingletonC.Intance inside SingletonD constructor returned null . If we tried to create cyclic dependency with our first solution we would get a StackOverflowException . So at least we would know that something is wrong. Anyway looks like creating a singleton requires some skills…

And since we are talking about singletons already, its also worth to know that .NET allows us to create an instance of type without invoking constructor (useful when implementing e.g. JSON serialization library). Objects created this way will be of course incomplete but still:

FormatterServices . GetUninitializedObject ( typeof ( SingletonC ));

And of course we don’t even talk about reflection API that we may use to destroy even most foolproof singletons.

So I guess now its a summary time! If you want to use singletons in your code that badly, please read carefully Jon Skeet articles from reference section. For the rest of us: let’s forget about handcrafted singletons and start using Dependency Injection!

PS. Also be careful when asking questions about Singletons at job interviews unless you want to hear discussion about beforefieldinit ;)

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