Re: Do I need to sync Get methods that return thread-safe collections

From:
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= <arne@vajhoej.dk>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Sat, 02 Aug 2008 10:36:01 -0400
Message-ID:
<489470cf$0$90266$14726298@news.sunsite.dk>
Royan wrote:

I'm trying to find potential pitfall in unsynchronized methods that
return thread-safe collections. Assume i'm designing a thread-safe
class.

public class ThreadSafe {

    private Vector<String> vector;

    /** Normally i'd write something like */
    public int someMethod() {
        lock.lock();

        try {
            // Do thread-safe things and change vector
            vector.clear()
        } finally {
            lock.unlock();
        }
    }

    /** But is OK to have such method? */
    public Vector<String> getVector() {
        return vector;
    }
}

Of course I would not bother about thread safety if there was just
Vector object, in my project there are plenty of other things that
really need to be synchronized, my only concern is #getVector() method
with respect to my question


The method getVector itself is thread safe.

What you do with the Vector<String> returned from it
may or may not be thread safe.

Arne

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