Re: AtomicXXXX.weakCompareAndSet source ... ?

From:
Thomas Hawtin <usenet@tackline.plus.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Wed, 22 Nov 2006 16:53:24 +0000
Message-ID:
<4564804e$0$8740$ed2619ec@ptn-nntp-reader02.plus.net>
Red Orchid wrote:

But, it seems to me that the implementation is not safe in a
multithreaded environment in some senses. "addAndGet" or


There are so many senses of thread-safe...

"incrementAndGet" etc are not atomic methods, accordingly
the calling order of them is not preserved. Moreover it is


Either one method or the other should happen-before the other.

possible that they can never finish their tasks at the worst.


Only if the architecture you are running on is unfeasibly unfair. but
then the same is true of synchronization (unsurprisingly).

If addAndGet needs to go around the loop again, that can only mean
another thread has made progress. It's not a deadlock. Because the body
is so short, it is not an important factor for any realistically
contended locks (although I believe you can make microbenchmarks where
it is a problem - and possibly on _HUGE_ machines with complicated
memory architectures).

public final long addAndGet(long delta) {
    for (;;) {
        long current = get(); // P1
        long next = current + delta;
        if (compareAndSet(current, next)) // P2
                return next;
    }
}

public final long get() {
    return value; // volatile
}
<code>

For Thread 0, 1 , .. N.

Between P1 and P2 of Thread_I, it is practicable that
Thread_J calls 'get()' and then finishs his task earlier
than Thread_I.


Yup. But it's still atomic. It's as if one method did it's entire
execution before the other. It doesn't matter which. Other operations in
either thread are not atomic together with the atomic operation.

                  Moreover Thread_J can call 'get()'
repeatedly with high priority.


Do you mean set? You could do. But progress would always be made be some
thread. Calling get does not cause addAndGet to reiterate.

There are a pair of relevant wikipedia aritcles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock-free_and_wait-free_algorithms
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-blocking_synchronization

Tom Hawtin

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