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Are these Single Instance Implementations equally Thread Safe? [duplicate]

In other words, is this Singleton implementation thread safe:

public class Singleton
{
    private static Singleton instance;

    private Singleton() { }

    static Singleton()
    {
        instance = new Singleton();
    }

    public static Singleton Instance
    {
        get { return instance; }
    }
}
like image 588
urini Avatar asked Nov 20 '22 14:11

urini


2 Answers

Static constructors are guaranteed to be run only once per application domain, before any instances of a class are created or any static members are accessed. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/classes-and-structs/static-constructors

The implementation shown is thread safe for the initial construction, that is, no locking or null testing is required for constructing the Singleton object. However, this does not mean that any use of the instance will be synchronised. There are a variety of ways that this can be done; I've shown one below.

public class Singleton
{
    private static Singleton instance;
    // Added a static mutex for synchronising use of instance.
    private static System.Threading.Mutex mutex;
    private Singleton() { }
    static Singleton()
    {
        instance = new Singleton();
        mutex = new System.Threading.Mutex();
    }

    public static Singleton Acquire()
    {
        mutex.WaitOne();
        return instance;
    }

    // Each call to Acquire() requires a call to Release()
    public static void Release()
    {
        mutex.ReleaseMutex();
    }
}
like image 195
Zooba Avatar answered Nov 23 '22 05:11

Zooba


While all of these answers are giving the same general answer, there is one caveat.

Remember that all potential derivations of a generic class are compiled as individual types. So use caution when implementing static constructors for generic types.

class MyObject<T>
{
    static MyObject() 
    {
       //this code will get executed for each T.
    }
}

EDIT:

Here is the demonstration:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    var obj = new Foo<object>();
    var obj2 = new Foo<string>();
}

public class Foo<T>
{
    static Foo()
    {
         System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(String.Format("Hit {0}", typeof(T).ToString()));        
    }
}

In the console:

Hit System.Object
Hit System.String
like image 30
Brian Rudolph Avatar answered Nov 23 '22 03:11

Brian Rudolph