Singleton: How should it be used

Question

Edit: From another question I provided an answer that has links to a lot of questions/answers about singletons: More info about singletons here:

So I have read th

Answer 1

The problem with singletons is not their implementation. It is that they conflate two different concepts, neither of which is obviously desirable.

1) Singletons provide a global access mechanism to an object. Although they might be marginally more threadsafe or marginally more reliable in languages without a well-defined initialization order, this usage is still the moral equivalent of a global variable. It's a global variable dressed up in some awkward syntax (foo::get_instance() instead of g_foo, say), but it serves the exact same purpose (a single object accessible across the entire program) and has the exact same drawbacks.

2) Singletons prevent multiple instantiations of a class. It's rare, IME, that this kind of feature should be baked into a class. It's normally a much more contextual thing; a lot of the things that are regarded as one-and-only-one are really just happens-to-be-only-one. IMO a more appropriate solution is to just create only one instance--until you realize that you need more than one instance.