Destruction-Managed Singleton: a compound pattern for reliable deallocation of singletons

Singleton [1] is a creational pattern with well-defined semantics ensuring that the instance is always created prior to use. This effectively solves the problem of initialization order when a number of interrelated objects are involved. But the pattern’s destruction semantics is inadequate for several singletons with complex dependencies among them. A Destruction-Managed Singleton complements this pattern by imposing a sound order of object destruction. Destruction-Managed Singleton is an instance of the Object Lifetime Manager pattern [2], which “governs the entire lifetime of objects, from creating them prior to their first use, to ensuring they are destroyed properly at program termination”.