CHAPTER 17: Threads and Locks

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17.4 Nonatomic Treatment of Double and Long Variables

If a double or long variable is not declared volatile , then for the purposes of load, store, read, and write actions they are treated as if they were two variables of 32 bits each: wherever the rules require one of these actions, two such actions are performed, one for each 32-bit half. The manner in which the 64 bits of a double or long variable are encoded into two 32-bit quantities is implementation-dependent.

This matters only because a read or write of a double or long variable may be handled by an actual main memory as two 32-bit read or write actions that may be separated in time, with other actions coming between them. Consequently, if two threads concurrently assign distinct values to the same shared non-volatile double or long variable, a subsequent use of that variable may obtain a value that is not equal to either of the assigned values, but some implementation-dependent mixture of the two values.

An implementation is free to implement load, store, read, and write actions for double and long values as atomic 64-bit actions; in fact, this is strongly encouraged. The model divides them into 32-bit halves for the sake of several currently popular microprocessors that fail to provide efficient atomic memory transactions on 64-bit quantities. It would have been simpler for Java to define all memory transactions on single variables as atomic; this more complex definition is a pragmatic concession to current hardware practice. In the future this concession may be eliminated. Meanwhile, programmers are cautioned always to explicitly synchronize access to shared double and long variables.