The Java® Language Specification, Java SE 7 Edition, Fourth Edition
by James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy Steele, Gilad Bracha, Alex Buckley
17.6. Word Tearing
One consideration for implementations of the Java Virtual Machine is that every field and array element is considered distinct; updates to one field or element must not interact with reads or updates of any other field or element. In particular, two threads that update adjacent elements of a byte array separately must not interfere or interact and do not need synchronization to ensure sequential consistency.
Some processors do not provide the ability to write to a single byte. It would be illegal to implement byte array updates on such a processor by simply reading an entire word, updating the appropriate byte, and then writing the entire word back to memory. This problem is sometimes known as word tearing, and on processors ...
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