java.io.File field "path" is not declared final

[Rémi Forax]

Reported by a user on the concurrency-interest mailing list,
File field "path" is not declared final but should be.

cheers,
Rémi

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[concurrency-interest] File object is not immutable?
Date: 	Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:00:59 +0400
From: 	Ruslan Cheremin <cheremin at gmail.com>
To: 	concurrency-interest at cs.oswego.edu



I was very surprised to see that field "path" in java.io.File is not
final. I was treating File object in concurrency area is something
like String --  fully immutable, and completely thread-safe, even
data-race safe.

Am I right supposing that File object is _not_ thread safe by itself
(as String does), and it is programmer's responsibility to safe
publish it between threads? Or may be it is some kind of hidden magic,
which makes File safe, even without explicit final? I mean, there is
native calls to FileSystem in constructor and deserialization, which
can create membars implictly...


----
Cheremin Ruslan


On 02/15/2012 06:15 PM, Alan Bateman wrote:

> On 15/02/2012 17:14, Rémi Forax wrote:
>>
>> The javadoc says File is immutable so it's a bug :(
>> There is no guarantee that the fs object will do a memory barrier.
>>
>> I think path is not final because of the serialization code but
>> it should be final and the seralization code should use
>> reflection or sun.misc.Unsafe.
>>
>> I've put Alan Bateman in CC because I don't know if java.io.File is
>> managed by the core team or the nio one.
>>
> Definitely bring it up on core-libs-dev as we should change it to be 
> final.
>
> -Alan