JMM Thread-safety: synchronized and volatile



19.  What do you understand by thread-safety ? Why is it required ? And finally, how to achieve thread-safety in Java Applications ? 

Java Memory Model defines the legal interaction of threads with the memory in a real computer system. In a way, it describes what behaviors are legal in multi-threaded code. It determines when a Thread can reliably see writes to variables made by other threads. It defines semantics for volatile, final & synchronized, that makes guarantee of visibility of memory operations across the Threads.

There are two type of memory barrier instructions in JMM - read barriers and write barrier.

A read barrier invalidates the local memory (cache, registers, etc) and then reads the contents from the main memory, so that changes made by other threads becomes visible to the current Thread.
A write barrier flushes out the contents of the processor's local memory to the main memory, so that changes made by the current Thread becomes visible to the other threads.

JMM semantics for synchronized
When a thread acquires monitor of an object, by entering into a synchronized block of code, it performs a read barrier (invalidates the local memory and reads from the heap instead). Similarly exiting from a synchronized block as part of releasing the associated monitor, it performs a write barrier (flushes changes to the main memory)
Thus modifications to a shared state using synchronized block by one Thread, is guaranteed to be visible to subsequent synchronized reads by other threads. This guarantee is provided by JMM in presence of synchronized code block.

JMM semantics for Volatile fields
Read & write to volatile variables have same memory semantics as that of acquiring and releasing a monitor using synchronized code block. So the visibility of volatile field is guaranteed by the JMM. Moreover afterwards Java 1.5, volatile reads and writes are not reorderable with any other memory operations (volatile and non-volatile both). Thus when Thread A writes to a volatile variable V, and afterwards Thread B reads from variable V, any variable values that were visible to A at the time V was written are guaranteed now to be visible to B.
Read full article from Top 25 Most Frequently Asked Interview Core Java Interview Questions And Answers

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