Java Concurrency in Practice

Appendix A. Annotations for Concurrency

We've used annotations such as @GuardedBy and @ThreadSafe to show how thread-safety promises and synchronization policies can be documented. This appendix documents these annotations; their source code can be downloaded from this book's website. (There are, of course, additional thread-safety promises and implementation details that should be documented but that are not captured by this minimal set of annotations.)

A.1. Class Annotations

We use three class-level annotations to describe a class's intended thread-safety promises: @Immutable, @ThreadSafe, and @NotThreadSafe. @Immutable means, of course, that the class is immutable, and implies @ThreadSafe. @NotThreadSafe is optional—if a class is not annotated ...