I have just finished reading Java Concurrency in Practice yesterday and would like to share some excerpts from the book on safe object publication in Java. Before stepping into the details, I would like to state that I found every single page of the book quite useful and found numerous places that I can enhance my existing code base during my daily coding routine. Thanks to @BrianGoetz et al for such a comprehensive and practical guide. (For those who want to go further up to its extremes, I strongly recommend you to check Aleksey Shipilёv’s Safe Publication and Safe Initialization in Java article – a must read on the subject.)

(Presented excerpts are copied directly, sometimes with slight changes, from Java Concurrency in Practice.)

Safe Construction Practices

An object is in a predictable, consistent state only after its constructor returns, so publishing an object from within its constructor can publish an incompletely constructed object. This is true even if the publication is the last statement in the constructor. If the this reference escapes during construction, the object is considered not properly constructed.

public class ThisEscape { public ThisEscape ( EventSource source ) { source . registerListener ( new EventListener () { public void onEvent ( Event event ) { doSomething ( event ); } }); } }

Here, when ThisEscape publishes the EventListener , it implicitly publishes the enclosing ThisEscape instance as well, because inner class instances contain a hidden reference to the enclosing instance.

If you are tempted to register an event listener or start a thread from a constructor, you can avoid the improper construction by using a private constructor and a public factory method, as shown in SafeListener below.

public class SafeListener { private final EventListener listener ; private SafeListener () { listener = new EventListener () { public void onEvent ( Event event ) { doSomething ( event ); } } } public static SafeListener newInstance ( EventSource source ) { SafeListener safe = new SafeListener (); source . registerListener ( safe . listener ); return safe ; } }

Lazy Initialization

Unsafe publication can happen as a result of an incorrect lazy initialization as follows.

@NotThreadSafe public class UnsafeLazyInitialization { private static Resource resource ; public static Resource getInstance () { if ( resource == null ) resource = new Resource (); return resource ; } }

Under certain circumstances, such as when all instances of the Resource are identical, you might be willing to overlook these (along with the inefficiency of possibly creating the Resource more than once). Unfortunately, even if these defects are overlooked, UnsafeLazyInitialization is still not safe, because another thread could observe a reference to a partially constructed Resource .

Suppose thread A is the first to invoke getInstance . It sees that resource is null , instantiates a new Resource , and sets resource to reference it. When thread B later calls getInstance , it might see that resource already has a non-null value and just use the already constructed Resource . This might look harmless at first, but there is no happens-before ordering between the writing of resource in A and the reading of resource in B . A data race has been used to publish the object, and therefore B is not guaranteed to see the correct state of the Resource .

The Resource constructor changes the fields of the freshly allocated Resource from their default values (written by the Object constructor) to their initial values. Since neither thread used synchronization, B could possible see A ’s actions in a different order than A performed them. So even though A initialized the Resource before setting resource to reference it, B could see the write to resource as occuring before the writes to the fields of the Resource . B could thus see a partially constructed Resource that may well be in an invalid state – and whose state may unexpectedly change later.

UnsafeLazyInitialization can be fixed by making the getResource method synchronized as follows.

@ThreadSafe public class SafeLazyInitialization { private static Resource resource ; public synchronized static Resource getInstance () { if ( resource == null ) resource = new Resource (); return resource ; } }

Because the code path through the getInstance is fairly short (a test and a predicted branch), if getInstance is not called frequently by many threads, there is a little enough contention for the SafeLazyInitialization lock that this approach offers adequate performance.

The treatment of static fields with initializers (or fields whose value is initialized in a static initialization block [JPL 2.2.1 and 2.5.3]) is somewhat special and offers additional thread-safety guarantees. Static initializers are run by the JVM at class initialization time, after class loading but before the class is used by any thread. Because the JVM acquires a lock during initialization [JSL 12.4.2] and this lock is acquired by each thread at least once to ensure that the class has been loaded, memory writes made during static initialization are automatically visible to all threads. Thus statically initialized objects require no explicit synchronization either during construction or when being referenced. However, this applies only to the as-constructed state – if the object is mutable, synchronization is still required by both readers and writers to make subsequent modifications visible to avoid data corruption.

@ThreadSafe public class EagerInitialization { private static Resource resource = new Resource (); public static Resource getResource () { return resource ; } }

Using eager initialization eliminates the synchronization cost incurred on each call to getInstace in SafeLazyInitialization . This technique can be combined with the JVM’s lazy class loading to create a lazy initialization technique that does not require synchronization on the common code path. The lazy initialization holder class idiom [EJ Item 48] presented below uses a class whose only purpose is to initialize the Resource .

@ThreadSafe public class ResourceFactory { private static class ResourceHolder { public static Resource resource = new Resource (); } public static Resource getResource () { return ResourceHolder . resource ; } }