concurrency - Java memory model - can someone explain it?

Question

For years and years, I've tried to understand the part of Java specification that deals with memory model and concurrency. I have to admit that I've failed miserably. Yes' I understand about locks and "synchronized" and wait() and notify(). And I can use them just fine, thank you. I even have a vague idea about what "volatile" does. But all of that was not derived from the language spec - rather from general experience.

Here are two sample questions that I am asking. I am not so much interested in particular answers, as I need to understand how the answers are derived from the spec (or may be how I conclude that the spec has no answer).

• What does "volatile" do, exactly?
• Are writes to variable atomic? Does it depend on variable's type?

Answer 1

I'm not going to attempt to actually answer your questions here - instead I'll redirect you to the book which I seeing recommended for advice on this topic: Java Concurrency in Practice.

One word of warning: if there are answers here, expect quite a few of them to be wrong. One of the reasons I'm not going to post details is because I'm pretty sure I'd get it wrong in at least some respects. I mean no disrespect whatsoever to the community when I say that the chances of everyone who thinks they can answer this question actually having enough rigour to get it right is practically zero. (Joe Duffy recently found a bit of the .NET memory model that was surprised by. If he can get it wrong, so can mortals like us.)

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I will offer some insight on just one aspect, because it's often misunderstood:

There's a difference between volatility and atomicity. People often think that an atomic write is volatile (i.e. you don't need to worry about the memory model if the write is atomic). That's not true.

Volatility is about whether one thread performing a read (logically, in the source code) will "see" changes made by another thread.

Atomicity is about whether there is any chance that if a change is seen, only part of the change will be seen.

For instance, take writing to an integer field. That is guaranteed to be atomic, but not volatile. That means that if we have (starting at foo.x = 0):

Thread 1: foo.x = 257;
Thread 2: int y = foo.x;

It's possible for y to be 0 or 257. It won't be any other value, (e.g. 256 or 1) due to the atomicity constraint. However, even if you know that in "wall time" the code in thread 2 executed after the code in thread 1, there could be odd caching, memory accesses "moving" etc. Making the variable x volatile will fix this.

I'll leave the rest up to real honest-to-goodness experts.