Atomic Boolean
Explore the AtomicBoolean class in Java's concurrency utilities to understand its atomic update capabilities. This lesson teaches how AtomicBoolean ensures thread-safe boolean operations using compareAndSet methods, contrasting it with volatile booleans, and demonstrates practical examples for managing concurrent state in multithreaded applications.
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Explanation
The AtomicBoolean class belonging to Java’s java.util.concurrency.atomic package represents a boolean value that can be updated and modified atomically. The Atomic* family of classes extend the notion of volatile variables that are designed to be operated upon without locking using machine-level atomic instructions available on modern processors. However, on other platforms some form of internal locking may be used to serialize thread access.
Atomic* classes including AtomicBoolean offer a method compareAndSet(expectedValue, updatedValue) to conditionally update the value of the variable to updatedValue if it is set to expectedValue in one go, i.e. atomically. All read-and-update methods except for lazySet() and weakCompareAndSet() have memory effects equivalent of both reading and writing volatile variables.
The read and write ...