Question

I have a method that starts a thread, and I want to have the method block until the thread finishes its setup stage, or else face a race condition.

I know I want to use wait notify, but I don’t know how to own the monitor and so on.

Answer 1

Move your “setup stage” out of run() and into an init() method.

MyRunnableClass mrc = new MyRunnableClass();
mrc.init();
Thread t = new Thread(mrc);
t.start();

Edit: Or as @Buhb noted in the comments below, just put it in the constructor. Years of C++ makes old habits die hard.