[Vanit]

You may as well just use a singleton pattern if you're going to do this, and at least that's easier to maintain if your use cases change.

[flohofwoe]

Just use a flat C-style function API instead of a Singleton object. Singletons are only really needed in languages that enforce the 'everything is an object' folly.

[chikere232]

Singletons are just globals for people who have learnt "globals are bad" but lack a deeper understanding

[Salgat]

Not exactly. For example, you can have a singleton object that maintains a persistent connection to a db to persist logs to. No one's going to inject the "ElasticsearchLogger" object in their method/class by accident, and even then, they'll only have access to the singleton state that the class lets them have access to. So now your private Counter variable is inside a global singleton without being accessible by anyone, even if that person is disregarding all of OP's rules.

[pinoy420]

Not sure how that is any different besides construction of an object rather than a file with globals?

[jwarden]

A singleton object can encapsulate the global state, converting global variables to private fields. How would this be different? Because a counter singleton can for example disallow directly setting the count field, only allowing the count to be incremented through a method.

[n0w]

I think the suggestion is to encapsulate global mutable state behind a strict interface (if you want global mutable state)

[levodelellis]

I'm the author

No, please don't