Question

Reading this DZone article about Java concurrency I was wondering if the following code:

    private volatile List list;
    private final Lock lock = new ReentrantLock();

    public void update(List newList) {
        ImmutableList l = new ImmutableList().addAll(newList);
        lock.lock();
        list = l;
        lock.unlock();
    }

    public List get() {
        return list;
    }

is equivalent to:

    private volatile List list;

    public void update(List newList) {
        ImmutableList l = new ImmutableList().addAll(newList); 
        list = l;
    }

    public List get() {
        return list;
    }

The try { } finally { } block was omitted for brevity. I assume the ImmutableList class to be a truly immutable data structure that holds its own data, such as the one provided in the google-collections library. Since the list variable is volatile and basically what’s going on is a copy-on-the-fly, isn’t it safe to just skip on using locks?

Answer 1

In this very specific example, I think you would be OK with no locking on the variable reassignment.

In general, I think you are better off using an AtomicReference instead of a volatile variable as the memory consistency effects are the same and the intent is much clearer.