Answer by T.E.D. for How do you implement the Singleton design pattern?

It is indeed probably allocated from the heap, but without the sources there is no way of knowing.

The typical implementation (taken from some code I have in emacs already) would be:

Singleton * Singleton::getInstance() {    if (!instance) {        instance = new Singleton();    };    return instance;};

...and rely on the program going out of scope to clean up afterwards.

If you work on a platform where cleanup must be done manually, I'd probably add a manual cleanup routine.

Another issue with doing it this way is that it isn't thread-safe. In a multithreaded environment, two threads could get through the "if" before either has a chance to allocate the new instance (so both would). This still isn't too big of a deal if you are relying on program termination to clean up anyway.