Pattern for lazy thread-safe singleton instantiation in java

Igor Mukhin picture Igor Mukhin · Sep 3, 2010 · Viewed 14.1k times · Source

the lazy thread-safe singleton instantion is kinda not easy to understand to every coder, so i wanted to create a class in our enterprise framework that would do the job.

What do you think about it? Do you see something bad about it? Is there something similar like in Apache Commons? How can i make it better?

Supplier.java

public interface Supplier<T> {
    public T get();
}

LazyThreadSafeInstantiator.java

public class LazyThreadSafeInstantiator<T> implements Supplier<T> {
    private final Supplier<T> instanceSupplier;

    private volatile T obj;

    public LazyThreadSafeInstantiator(Supplier<T> instanceSupplier) {
        this.instanceSupplier = instanceSupplier;
    }

    @Override
    // http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-checked_locking
    public T get() {
        T result = obj;  // Wikipedia: Note the usage of the local variable result which seems unnecessary. For some versions of the Java VM, it will make the code 25% faster and for others, it won't hurt.
        if (result == null) {
            synchronized(this) {
                result = obj;
                if (result == null) {
                    result = instanceSupplier.get();
                    obj = result;
                }
            }
        }
        return result;
    }
}

Example usage:

public class Singleton1 {
    private static final Supplier<Singleton1> instanceHolder =
        new LazyThreadSafeInstantiator<Singleton1>(new Supplier<Singleton1>() {
            @Override
            public Singleton1 get() {
                return new Singleton1();
            }
        });

    public Singleton1 instance() {
        return instanceHolder.get();
    }

    private Singleton1() {
        System.out.println("Singleton1 instantiated");
    }
}

Thanks

Answer

Michael Borgwardt picture Michael Borgwardt · Sep 3, 2010

the lazy thread-safe singleton instantion is kinda not easy to understand to every coder

No, it's actually very, very easy:

public class Singleton{
    private final static Singleton instance = new Singleton();
    private Singleton(){ ... }
    public static Singleton getInstance(){ return instance; }
}

Better yet, make it an enum:

public enum Singleton{
    INSTANCE;
    private Singleton(){ ... }
}

It's threadsafe, and it's lazy (initialization happens at class loading time, and Java does not load classes until they are are first referred).

Fact is, 99% of the time you don't need lazy loading at all. And out of the remaining 1%, in 0.9% the above is perfectly lazy enough.

Have you run a profiler and determined that your app belings to the 0.01% that really needs lazy-loading-at-first-access? Didn't think so. Then why are you wasting your time concocting these Rube Goldbergesque code abominations to solve a non-existing problem?