Erlang and Singleton good practice?

Question

Since Erlang isnt really object oriented, there is no real singleton class but i guess a process which is registered can be used as one.

Is it good practice to use registered processes for that inside an application to make the access easier? Disadvantage i see that for example that you cannot run more than one instance of such an application inside one node.

Take as example a gui application with a process managing the events and some other responsible for the sound. Would it be good practise to make those 2 "singleton" as registered processes and call them like sound:play(file_name) instead of storing the pid and doing sound:play(Pid, file_name)?

Answer 1

It is fairly common to use a gen_server under a registered name to do exactly this. You can export functions from that same module which simply do a gen_server:call against the named process in question.

(Arguably, Erlang is more "really" OO than what you're probably used to. But that's not what this question is about.)