17.5. final Field Semantics
Fields declared final are initialized once, but never changed under normal circumstances. The detailed semantics of final fields are somewhat different from those of normal fields. In particular, compilers have a great deal of freedom to move reads of final fields across synchronization barriers and calls to arbitrary or unknown methods. Correspondingly, compilers are allowed to keep the value of a final field cached in a register and not reload it from memory in situations where a non-final field would have to be reloaded.
final fields also allow programmers to implement thread-safe immutable objects without synchronization. A thread-safe immutable object is seen as immutable by all threads, even if a data race is ...
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