Staticish

Make a singleton class that wraps the methods so they appear like class methods

Synopsis

use Staticish;

class Foo is Static {
    has Str $.bar is rw;
}

Foo.bar = "There you go";
say Foo.bar; # > "There you go";

Description

This provides a mechanism whereby a class can be treated as a "singleton" and all of its methods wrapped such that if they are called as "class" or "static" methods they will actually be called on the single instance. It does this by applying a role to the class itself which provides a constructor "new()" that will always return the same instance of the object, and by applying a role to the classes Meta class which over-rides the "add_method" method in order to wrap the programmer supplied methods such that if the method is called on the type object (i.e. as a class method) then the single instance will be obtained and the method will be called with that as the invocant.

This might be useful for a class such as a configuration parser or logger where a single set of parameters will be used globally within an application and it doesn't make sense to pass a single object around.

It may not deal with every possible use case properly, but it largely does what I need it to. Suggestions, patches etc are welcome.

Installation

Assuming you have a working Rakudo installation you should be able to install this with zef :

# From the source directory

zef install .

# Remote installation

zef install Staticish

Support

This has never worked quite as well as I'd hoped when pre-compiled into another module as it flies too close to the wind of what will work. If you find you hit a problem with it then you should try adding no precompilation; to your module before the use Staticish;.

Suggestions/patches are welcomed via github

Licence

This is free software.

Please see the LICENCE file in the distribution

© Jonathan Stowe 2015 - 2021