Question

I have a singleton, and I’m debating whether it would be bad practice to have some static methods that sort of hide the singleton’s usage from the client. For example:

Singleton::Instance()->Foo();

Vs.

Singleton::FooHelper();

Where FooHelper is defined:

class Singleton
{
    ...

    static void FooHelper()
    {
        Singleton::Instance()->Foo();
    }
    ...
}

Is the second solution considered bad practice? I wouldn’t be making helper functions for all the methods of Singleton, just the ones that are used very frequently by the client code.

Answer 1

This is not bad practice as long as 1° the original Foo() method is still publicly available and 2° the naming scheme makes it obvious that FooHelper() is equivalent to calling Foo() on the instance.

Of course, if you find yourself always calling FooHelper() and never calling Foo(), reconsider your design: the point of a singleton (as opposed to a plain global-functions-in-namespace approach) is that it’s an object — so at least some parts of your code should be using it as such.