Singleton Destructors

Question

Should Singleton objects that don\'t use instance/reference counters be considered memory leaks in C++?

Without a counter that calls for explicit deletion of the singlet

Answer 1

Any kind of allocation, except those in shared memories, are automatically cleaned up by the operating system when the process terminates. Therefore you should not have to explicitly call the singleton destructor. In other words no leaks...

Furthermore a typical singleton implementation like the Meyers' Singleton is not only thread safe during the initialization on the first call but also guaranteed to graceful terminate when the application exits (the destructor is invoked).

Anyway if the application is sent a unix signal (ie: SIGTERM or SIGHUP) the default behavior is to terminate the process without calling the destructors of static allocated objects (singletons). To overcome this issue for these signals it is possible to dispose a handler calling exit, or dispose exit be such handler -- signal(SIGTERM,exit);