I have an interesting variation on sharedInstance that is thread safe, but does not lock after the initialization. I am not yet sure enough of it to modify the top answer as requested, but I present it for further discussion:
// Volatile to make sure we are not foiled by CPU caches
static volatile ALBackendRequestManager *sharedInstance;
// There's no need to call this directly, as method swizzling in sharedInstance
// means this will get called after the singleton is initialized.
+ (MySingleton *)simpleSharedInstance
{
return (MySingleton *)sharedInstance;
}
+ (MySingleton*)sharedInstance
{
@synchronized(self)
{
if (sharedInstance == nil)
{
sharedInstance = [[MySingleton alloc] init];
// Replace expensive thread-safe method
// with the simpler one that just returns the allocated instance.
SEL origSel = @selector(sharedInstance);
SEL newSel = @selector(simpleSharedInstance);
Method origMethod = class_getClassMethod(self, origSel);
Method newMethod = class_getClassMethod(self, newSel);
method_exchangeImplementations(origMethod, newMethod);
}
}
return (MySingleton *)sharedInstance;
}