In article<4dGdncolCa4KuSvRRVn_vwA@giganews.com>,
Spud<fake@fkfkfkf.com> wrote:
Does the final keyword serve any purpose, except to make constants constant?
It used to be a hint to the JVM that it could make certain
optimizations, but I don't think that's true any more.
I use it only to create "private final static" quasi-constants, but
nowhere else. Yet I see lots of code out there that sprinkles it
liberally everywhere.
There still might be cases where it causes optimization because one of
the HotSpot optimizations is not spending too much time analyzing large
blocks of code before compilation.
In addition to other things mentioned, it's sometimes critical for code
maintenance. Objects used as lookup keys must be immutable or the
structure that they're in will be damaged. It's best to enforce that
during compilation rather than be careful and hope for the best.