How do I debug singletons in Objective-C_问答_开发者

My app contains several singletons (following from this tutorial). I've noticed however, when the app crashes because of a singleton, it becom开发者_JAVA百科es nearly impossible to figure out where it came from. The app breakpoints at the main function giving an EXEC_BAD_ACCESS even though the problem lies in one of the Singleton objects. Is there a guide to how would I debug my singleton objects if they were problematic?

if you don't want to change your design (as recommended in my other post), then consider the usual debugging facilities: assertions, unit tests, zombie tests, memory tests (GuardMalloc, scribbling), etc. this should identify the vast majority of issues one would encounter.

of course, you will have some restrictions regarding what you can and cannot do - notably regarding what cannot be tested independently using unit tests.

as well, reproducibility may be more difficult in some contexts when/if you are dealing with a complex global state because you have created several enforced singletons. when the global state is quite large and complex - testing these types independently may not be fruitful in all cases since the bug may appear only in a complex global state found in your app (when 4 singletons interact in a specific manner). if you have isolated the issue to interactions of multiple singleton instances (e.g. MONAudioFileCache and MONVideoCache), placing these objects in a container class will allow you to introduce coupling, which will help diagnose this. although increasing coupling is normally considered a bad thing; this does't really increase coupling (it already exists as components of the global state) but simply concentrates existing global state dependencies -- you're really not increasing it as much as you are concentrating it when the state of these singletons affect other components of the mutable global state.

if you still insist on using singletons, these may help:

either make them thread safe or add some assertions to verify mutations happen only on the main thread (for example). too many people assume an object with atomic properties implies the object is thread safe. that is false.
encapsulate your data better, particularly that which mutates. for example: rather than passing out an array your class holds for the client to mutate, have the singleton class add the object to the array it holds. if you truly must expose the array to the client, then return a copy. ths is just basic ood, but many objc devs expose the majority of their ivars disregarding the importance of encapsualtion.
if it's not thread safe and the class is used in a mutithreaded context, make the class (not the client) implement proper thread safety.
design singletons' error checking to be particularly robust. if the programmer passes an invalid argument or misuses the interface - just assert (with a nice message about the problem/resolution).
do write unit tests.
detach state (e.g. if you can remove an ivar easily, do it)
reduce complexity of state.
if something is still impossible to debug after writing/testing with thorough assertions, unit tests, zombie tests, memory tests (GuardMalloc, scribbling), etc,, you are writing programs which are too complex (e.g. divide the complexity among multiple classes), or the requirements do not match the actual usage. if you're at that point, you should definitely refer to my other post. the more complex the global variable state, the more time it will take to debug, and the less you can reuse and test your programs when things do go wrong.

good luck

I scanned the article, and while it had some good ideas it also had some bad advice, and it should not be taken as gospel.

And, as others have suggested, if you have a lot of singleton objects it may mean that you're simply keeping too much state global/persistent. Normally only one or two of your own should be needed (in addition to those that other "packages" of one sort or another may implement).

As to debugging singletons, I don't understand why you say it's hard -- no worse than anything else, for the most part. If you're getting EXEC_BAD_ACCESS it's because you've got some sort of addressing bug, and that's nothing specific to singleton schemes (unless you're using a very bad one).

Macros make debugging difficult because the lines of code they incorporate can't have breakpoints put in them. Deep six macros, if nothing else. In particular, the SYNTHESIZE_SINGLETON_FOR_CLASS macro from the article is interfering with debugging. Replace the call to this macro function with the code it generates for your singleton class.

ugh - don't enforce singletons. just create normal classes. if your app needs just one instance, add them to something which is created once, such as your app delegate.

most cocoa singleton implementations i've seen should not have been singletons.

then you will be able to debug, test, create, mutate and destroy these objects as usual.

the good part is course that the majority of your global variable pains will disappear when you implement these classes as normal objects.