It is far easier to design a class to be thread-safe than…

“Accessing shared, mutable data requires using synchronization; one way to avoid this requirement is to not share. If data is only accessed from a…

— Brian Goetz

At the most basic level, prioritizing design also represents a practical consideration. It's far easier to design first and engineer later.

— Ryan Holmes

“When a field is declared volatile, the compiler and runtime are put on notice that this variable is shared and that operations on it…

— Brian Goetz

“Sometimes abstraction and encapsulation are at odds with performance — although not nearly as often as many developers believe — but it is always…

— Brian Goetz

“Locking can guarantee both visibility and atomicity; volatile variables can only guarantee visibility.”

— Brian Goetz

“Immutable objects are simple. They can only be in one state, which is carefully controlled by the constructor. One of the most difficult elements…

— Brian Goetz

“Debugging tip: For server applications, be sure to always specify the -server JVM command line switch when invoking the JVM, even for development and…

— Brian Goetz

“From the perspective of a class C, an alien method is one whose behavior is not fully specified by C. This includes methods in…

— Brian Goetz

“The possibility of incorrect results in the presence of unlucky timing is so important in concurrent programming that it has a name: a race…

— Brian Goetz

“Just as it is a good practice to make all fields private unless they need greater visibility, it is a good practice to make…

— Brian Goetz

“Once an object escapes, you have to assume that another class or thread may, maliciously or carelessly, misuse it. This is a compelling reason…

— Brian Goetz

“Whenever more than one thread accesses a given state variable, and one of them might write to it, they all must coordinate their access…

— Brian Goetz

“Compound actions on shared state, such as incrementing a hit counter (read-modify-write) or lazy initialization (check-then-act), must be made atomic to avoid race conditions.…

— Brian Goetz