iOS Swift singleton pattern

When people are switching from Objective-C, then most common question is:"How the hell do I do this with Swift?!". In particular - iOS Swift singleton pattern. Sometimes the answer is a just satisfying, though sometimes the way something is handled in Swift just makes you wonder "why so simple?".

Singleton patter is one of those "Why so simple" things.

Objective-C Style

Many people would go with dispatch_once pattern. This wouldn't differ much from the Objective-C style and would like like a simple plain port. But plain ports are braking the spirit of the language you are porting your code to. And this dispatch_once would definitely be one of those. Just look at it:

class Singleton {

    class var sharedInstance: Singleton {
        struct Static {
            static var onceToken: dispatch_once_t = 0
            static var instance: Singleton? = nil
        }
        dispatch_once(&Static.onceToken) {
            Static.instance = Singleton()
        }

        return Static.instance!
    }

}

Meh.

Swift style

And now just take a look at singleton implementation in Swift:

class Singleton {
    static let sharedInstance = Singleton()
}

Clean, nice, awesome. Plus a good adivce I ran into at Hactor Matos' blog: make sure that your inits are private. This makes sure your singletons are truly unique and prevents outside objects from creating their own instances of your class. Since all objects come with a default public initializer in Swift, you need to override your init and make it private:

class Singleton {
    static let sharedInstance = Singleton()
    private override init() {}
}