I have been trying to use the Singleton pattern in Python with proper type hints.

Here is my attempt

from typing import Any, TypeVar, override


T = TypeVar('T', bound='SingletonBase')


class Singleton(type):
    _instances: dict[type[T], T] = {}  # type variable T has no meaning in this context

    @override
    def __call__(cls: type[T], *args: Any, **kwargs: dict[str, Any]) -> T:
        if cls not in cls._instances:  # Access to generic instance variable through class is ambiguous
            instance = super().__call__(*args, **kwargs)
            cls._instances[cls] = instance # Access to generic instance variable through class is ambiguous
        return cls._instances[cls]  # Expression of type T is incompatible with return type T@__call__


class SingletonBase(metaclass=Singleton):
    pass

I get a lot of complaints from the type checker. (I have annotate my code with the complaints as comments)

I found this answer Type hinting for generic singleton?

But that only handles annotations for the return type. I would like to understand what’s going on here and learn how to implement the Singleton pattern with proper type hints.