Alright so I started coding as a hobby a few years ago and im slowly learning new things and finding out what is good practice and what not, but recently after reading some articles about the singleton I've become confused. I'd like to discuss and get advice on the singleton pattern use. I know it's a very discussed subject on the internet and my questions may already be answered on some other post but I haven't managed to find a good place answering my questions.

I have a project I'm working on which is constantly growing and becoming more structured and complicated. At some point I read using globals is bad (try reading that in professor Mackey's voice from South Park, mkay? ). And at that point I was using many globals. So I searched for an alternative and some people were suggesting the singleton pattern. I was excited with the idea and replaced my globals with singleton classes (as necessary, some globals were probably removed ) and by the time I was done I had a few singleton classes.

Now I'm reading around some articles saying the singleton pattern is bad. I understand their arguments and realised that some of my singleton classes were an overkill so I changed them and I'm still in the process of rechecking my files and seeing if I can remove more singletons (because I honestly have too many atm). But I just can't get rid of some of them.

Is the singleton pattern such a curse that if I find I have to use it there is something wrong with my class structure? The problem is that in a multiple file project some data will need to be available in more than one place. So how should I achieve this state of "global" access? (Not entirely global, but more than local anyway)

Here is an example for those interested. My TextureManager class is a singleton. It's mostly used in an object loading function to find a texture if loaded in memory or load it otherwise. How can I access my texture manager in the object's load function if it's not a singleton? Pass it as an argument? Keep a pointer to it as a member of the class? None seem very efficient to me. Even if passing it as a reference isn't slowing performance, it makes functions more complicated than they need to be, since the texture manager reference would have to be passed down many functions to reach the load function.

I've used the search function (though I have to admit I didn't use google that way, thanks for the tip ) and I've mostly found posts explaining why they are bad and have to be avoided. I'm more interested in hearing alternatives that replace what a singleton provides, specifically about how singletons can be used to refer to the same data globally.

Perhaps I didn't stress that enough, I'm sorry.

I understand the sollutions may be specific to the code so a generic answer can't be provided, but how else could something like that be achieved? I've provided an example of a singleton class I can't see how I could replace. Do you (or others, for that matter) think this is a case where a singleton is necessary or am I not thinking outside the box?

I actually am pro singleton for the following reasons:

1. It is a generally recognized useful design pattern that is easy to grasp.

2. It makes a single instance of an object easily accessible.

3. It is not the same as a global because it has global scope. A well written singleton can have very controlled access even though it can be referenced globally.

4. If a singleton wrecks havoc in your code, blame the programmer and not the tool.

5. Singletons make the game states that they represent easy to debug.

These are just five points that come to mind.