Scala Per-Instance Singletons

I was reading about Lift and came across a funky scala syntax:

class Foo {
  object bar {
    val name = "bob"
  }
}

This:

1. Declares a Foo.bar field
2. Declares a bar inner class
3. Adds a Foo.bar() method that lazy-instantiates a single instance of the bar inner class for each Foo instance

Looking at the decompiled code, it makes more sense:

import java.rmi.RemoteException;
import scala.ScalaObject;

public class Foo implements ScalaObject {
    private bar. bar$module;

    public Foo() {
    }

    public final bar. bar() {
        class bar. implements ScalaObject {
            private final String name = "bob";
            public bar.() {
                super();
            }
            public String name() {
                return name;
            }
            public int $tag() throws RemoteException {
                return scala.ScalaObject.class.$tag(this);
            }
        }
        if(bar$module == null)
            bar$module = new bar.();
        return bar$module;
    }

    public int $tag() throws RemoteException {
        return scala.ScalaObject.class.$tag(this);
    }
}

My one curiosity is the lack of synchronization in the lazy initialization. I don’t know about the official Scala docs, but Lift insinuated an “inner object” declaration was a singleton, not a singleton-unless-you-have-lots-of-threads.

If you use top-level object declarations, it seems to make more sense:

object Bar {
  def zaz() = {
    println("hi")
  }
}

As this is decompiled to:

public final class Bar {
  public static final void zaz() {
    Bar..MODULE$.zaz();
  }

  public static final int $tag() throws RemoteException {
    return Bar..MODULE$.$tag();
  }
}

public final class Bar$ implements ScalaObject {
  public static final Bar$ MODULE$;

  static {
    new Bar$();
  }

  public Bar$() {
    MODULE$ = this;
  }

  public void zaz() {
    Predef..MODULE$.println("hi");
  }

  public int $tag() throws RemoteException {
    return ScalaObject.class.$tag(this);
  }
}

This uses the Bar$ static initializer to ensure there is just one instance of Bar$. Which works great.

“Inner” object declarations not being true singletons is probably not a big deal, it was just something I was curious about.