JDK 9 RFR of 6375303: Review use of caching in BigDecimal

[Mike Duigou]

On Mar 4 2014, at 07:13 , Peter Levart <peter.levart at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 03/04/2014 01:14 AM, Brian Burkhalter wrote:
>> - add AtomicReferenceFieldUpdater-type constant for stringCache initialization
> 
> Hi Brian,
> 
> By using volatile read and CAS, there's still a chance that multiple concurrent threads will be invoking the layoutChars(true) concurrently, but you guarantee that only a single instance of String will ever be returned as a result of the toString() method. Is that what you were pursuing?

Yes. (I provided the AtomicReferenceFieldUpdater code). The previous implementation had a benign data race that could result in a later layoutChars result replacing an earlier result and multiple string instances being returned. The new implementation, at small cost, prevents multiple different instances from being returned.

Mike