Java 9 Concurrency Cookbook - Second Edition

Using atomic arrays

Consider that you need to implement a concurrent application that has one or more objects shared by several threads. In such a scenario, you have to protect access to their attributes using a synchronization mechanism, such as locks or the synchronized keyword, to avoid data inconsistency errors.

These mechanisms have the following problems:

• Deadlock: This situation occurs when a thread is blocked waiting for a lock that is locked by other threads that will never free it. This situation blocks the program, so it will never finish.
• If only one thread is accessing the shared object, it has to execute the code necessary to get and release the lock.

To provide better performance in this situation, the compare-and-swap operation ...