What's a good threadsafe singleton generic template pattern in C#

Question

According to Jon Skeet in Implementing the Singleton Pattern in C# the code you posted is actually considered as bad code, because it appears broken when checked against the ECMA CLI standard.

Also watch out: everytime you instantiate your object with a new type of T, it becomes another instance; it doesn't get reflected in your original singleton.

This code won't compile, you need "class" constraint on T.

Also, this code requires public constructor on target class, which is not good for singleton, because you can't control at compile time that you obtain (single) instance only via Instance property (or field). If you don't have any other static members except Instance, you are ok to go with just this:

class Foo
{
  public static readonly Instance = new Foo();
  private Foo() {}
  static Foo() {}
}

It is thread safe (guaranteed by CLR) and lazy (instance is created with first access to type). For more discussion about BeforeFieldInit and why we need static constructor here, see https://csharpindepth.com/articles/BeforeFieldInit.

If you want to have other public static members on type, but create object only on access to Instance, you may create nested type, like in https://csharpindepth.com/articles/Singleton

Courtesy of Judith Bishop, http://patterns.cs.up.ac.za/

This singleton pattern implementation ensures lazy initialisation.

//  Singleton PatternJudith Bishop Nov 2007
//  Generic version

public class Singleton<T> where T : class, new()
{
    Singleton() { }

    class SingletonCreator
    {
        static SingletonCreator() { }
        // Private object instantiated with private constructor
        internal static readonly T instance = new T();
    }

    public static T UniqueInstance
    {
        get { return SingletonCreator.instance; }
    }
}

This is my point using .NET 4

public class Singleton<T> where T : class, new()
    {
        Singleton (){}

        private static readonly Lazy<T> instance = new Lazy<T>(()=> new T());

        public static T Instance { get { return instance.Value; } } 
    }