Functional Kotlin

Thread safety

We have probably seen a thousand times that immutability brings thread safety to the table along with it. What does it actually mean and how does immutability achieve thread safety? Working with multiple threads is itself a complex job. When you are accessing a class from multiple threads, you need to ensure certain things, like locking and releasing of the object and synchronization, but none of them are required if you are accessing any immutable data from multiple threads.

Confused? Let's have an example with threads and mutable data:

class MyData { var someData:Int = 0 } fun main(args: Array<String>) { val myData:MyData = MyData() async(CommonPool) { for(i in 11..20) { myData.someData+=i println("someData from 1st async ...