Singleton in Swift

Question

The standard singleton pattern is:

final class Manager {
    static let shared = Manager()

    private init() { ... }

    func foo() { ... }
}

And you’d use it like so:

Manager.shared.foo()

Credit to appzYourLife for pointing out that one should declare it final to make sure it’s not accidentally subclassed as well as the use of the private access modifier for the initializer, to ensure you don’t accidentally instantiate another instance. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/38793747/1271826.

So, returning to your image cache question, you would use this singleton pattern:

final class ImageCache {

    static let shared = ImageCache()

    /// Private image cache.

    private var cache = [String: UIImage]()

    // Note, this is `private` to avoid subclassing this; singletons shouldn't be subclassed.

    private init() { }

    /// Subscript operator to retrieve and update cache

    subscript(key: String) -> UIImage? {
        get {
            return cache[key]
        }

        set (newValue) {
            cache[key] = newValue
        }
    }
}

Then you can:

ImageCache.shared["photo1"] = image
let image2 = ImageCache.shared["photo2"])

Or

let cache = ImageCache.shared
cache["photo1"] = image
let image2 = cache["photo2"]

Having shown a simplistic singleton cache implementation above, we should note that you probably want to (a) make it thread safe by using NSCache; and (b) respond to memory pressure. So, the actual implementation is something like the following in Swift 3:

final class ImageCache: NSCache<AnyObject, UIImage> {

    static let shared = ImageCache()

    /// Observer for `UIApplicationDidReceiveMemoryWarningNotification`.

    private var memoryWarningObserver: NSObjectProtocol!

    /// Note, this is `private` to avoid subclassing this; singletons shouldn't be subclassed.
    ///
    /// Add observer to purge cache upon memory pressure.

    private override init() {
        super.init()

        memoryWarningObserver = NotificationCenter.default.addObserver(forName: .UIApplicationDidReceiveMemoryWarning, object: nil, queue: nil) { [weak self] notification in
            self?.removeAllObjects()
        }
    }

    /// The singleton will never be deallocated, but as a matter of defensive programming (in case this is
    /// later refactored to not be a singleton), let's remove the observer if deallocated.

    deinit {
        NotificationCenter.default.removeObserver(memoryWarningObserver)
    }

    /// Subscript operation to retrieve and update

    subscript(key: String) -> UIImage? {
        get {
            return object(forKey: key as AnyObject)
        }

        set (newValue) {
            if let object = newValue {
                setObject(object, forKey: key as AnyObject)
            } else {
                removeObject(forKey: key as AnyObject)
            }
        }
    }

}

And you’d use it as follows:

ImageCache.shared["foo"] = image

And

let image = ImageCache.shared["foo"]

For Swift 2.3 example, see previous revision of this answer.

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