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What does "Singleton" mean in programming?

Singleton is one of the most common terms in software development. This guide explains what it means, how it is used in practice, and why it matters, with real examples from the developer world.

Definition

A design pattern that restricts a class to a single instance and provides global access to it. Singletons are used for shared resources like database connections, loggers, and configuration. They are often criticized because they introduce global state and make testing harder.

Example

"The database connection pool is a Singleton: the application creates it once and every service reuses the same instance."

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