Use of static class variable other than constants

Question

My professor wants a "non-trivial" answer to the question of "What are the uses of a static class variable, besides constants?"

Aside from constants, the only one I can think of is keeping a count of the objects that have been instantiated from the class.

a google search of "uses of static variables" would be faster than making this question... — RAZ_Muh_Taz, Jan 31 '17 at 22:07
Possible duplicate of [Best Practice: Java static non final variables](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/731236/best-practice-java-static-non-final-variables) — default locale, Feb 01 '17 at 10:02

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:45

0

A certainly non-trivial answer to this question can be found in this question

In short, they're used to keep global state for the class and make our lives as developers worse for fighting hard to reason about tests.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:45

Community

answered Jan 31 '17 at 22:07

JChrist

Now that we have dependency injection, I consider singletons to be evil, as well. – azurefrog Jan 31 '17 at 22:38
In the era of `microservices` hype and increasing need (and demand) for horizontal scalability, singletons are coming to my mind as `code smell`, since they (usually) affect ability to scale – JChrist Feb 01 '17 at 11:52

1 Answers1