Java Projects - Second Edition

Atomic variables

Atomic classes enclose primitive values into objects and provide atomic operations on them. We discussed race conditions and volatile variables. For example, if we have an int variable to be used as a counter and we want to assign a unique value to objects that we work with, we can increment the value and use the result as a unique ID. However, when multiple threads use the same code, we cannot be sure about the value we read after the increment. It may happen that another thread also incremented the value in the meantime. To avoid that, we will have to enclose the increment and assign the incremented value to an object in a synchronized block. This can also be done using AtomicInteger.

If we have a variable of AtomicInteger ...