memo: Singleton design patter

_memo/singleton-design-pattern.md

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+---
+tags: engineering/backend, design pattern, creational, golang, software-architecture
+title: "A tour of Singleton design pattern with Golang"
+description: "Singleton real-world problem, concept, solution, use cases, implementations, pros & cons, references"
+author: Anh Nguyen
+date: 2024-06-08
+menu: memo
+type: memo
+hide_frontmatter: false
+pinned: false
+hide_title: false
+---
+
+![](assets/singleton-design-pattern.pdf)
+
+## Problem
+
+Just imagine we need to build a simple web page to show live subscribers of a Youtube channel. Main object here is "subscriber" so we need a tool (counter) to update number of subscribers in real-time.
+
+There are 2 actors: subscribers (Youtube) and visitors (our web page)
+
+When a user subscribes to a channel, we update the counter by +1. And we do the same for other incoming subscribers, but there are 2 things we have to keep in mind:
+
+- Handle concurrent subscription requests from users properly. Or else there will be a chance that we misscount a portion of subscribers
+- Use the same counter to update/get live subscriptions for all actors (subscribers & visitors)
+
+## Singleton Overview
+
+**Singleton** is one of the **Creational design patterns**. They have some characteristics:
+
+- One class/type can only create/have one single instance
+- Provide a global access to that single instance
+- We have many Singleton implementations to be used in single/multi-thread environment based on specific use case
+
+## What does Singleton resolve?
+
+Back to our above analogy with subscription counter, we can use Singleton to instatiate the counter and provide its global access.
+
+- All subscribers and visitors will access the same counter so data will be consistent
+- Since this is a multi-thread use case (e.g. multiple subscribers can subscribe simultaneously), we need to make sure the counter instantiation thread-safe
+
+## Applicability
+
+Use Singleton when you need to manage one & only instance of a resource (e.g. configuration, logger, etc.)
+
+## Approaches
+
+There are 2 ways to implement Singleton pattern:
+
+<table border="0">
+	<tr>
+    <td><b style="font-size:20px">Eager</b></td>
+    <td><b style="font-size:20px">Lazy</b></td>
+	</tr>
+	<tr>
+		<td>Initialize the instance as soon as your app is started</td>
+		<td>Initialize the instance as the first time it is requested (e.g. the counter is only instantiated when the first subscription is made)</td>
+	</tr>
+	<tr>
+		<td>Should only be applied to light-weight resource since it will take a lot of compute power at the beginning and reduce the app performance</td>
+		<td>Should not be applied to heavy-size resource since it will unnecessary take a lot of compute power at the beginning and reduce the app performance</td>
+ 	</tr>
+ 	<tr>
+ 		<td>Simple to implement, don't have to worry about race condition</td>
+		<td>More complex implementation, need to make sure the instantiation is thread-safe to avoid creating redundant instances</td>
+ 	</tr>
+</table>
+
+## Pseudocode (golang)
+
+First, define `counter` struct
+
+```go
+type counter struct {
+	views int
+}
+```
+
+<br/>
+
+**Eager initialization**
+
+```go
+var instance *counter = &counter{}
+
+func getCounter() *counter {
+	return instance
+}
+```
+
+<br/>
+
+**Lazy initialization**: use _double-checked locking mechanism_ to avoid unnecessary lock when the instance has already been initialized
+
+```go
+var instance *counter
+
+func getCounter() *counter {
+	// instance has not been initialized
+	if instance == nil {
+		// lock to avoid multiple instances are created simultaneously by multi threads
+		lock.Lock()
+		defer lock.Unlock()
+
+		// need to recheck because first check can be passed by multiple gorountines
+		if instance == nil {
+			instance = &counter{}
+		}
+	}
+
+	// when instance has already been initialized -> return
+	return instance
+}
+```
+
+## Benefits & Drawbacks
+
+**Benefits**<br/>
+👍 You can assure that the class/type has only one instance if the implementation is done properly
+
+**Drawbacks**<br/>
+👎 Tight coupled codebase<br/>
+👎 Hard to debug<br/>
+👎 Write unit tests will be tricky<br/>
+👎 Limited use cases<br/>
+
+## References
+- https://refactoring.guru/design-patterns/singleton