Question

I’m wondering what good ways there would be make assertions about synchronization or something so that I could detect synchronization violations (while testing).

That would be used for example for the case that I’d have a class that is not thread-safe and that isn’t going to be thread-safe. With some way I would have some assertion that would inform me (log or something) if some method(s) of it was called from multiple threads.

I’m longing for something similar that could be made for AWT dispatch thread with the following:

public static void checkDispatchThread() {     if(!SwingUtilities.isEventDispatchThread()) {         throw new RuntimeException('GUI change made outside AWT dispatch thread');     } } 

I’d only want something more general. The problem description isn’t so clear but I hope somebody has some good approaches =)

Answer 1

You are looking for the holy grail, I think. AFAIK it doesn’t exist, and Java is not a language that allows such an approach to be easily created.

‘Java Concurrency in Practice’ has a section on testing for threading problems. It draws special attention to how hard it is to do.