Doug Lea writes

"As probably the last little JSR166 follow-up for Mustang,
we added a "lazySet" method to the Atomic classes
(AtomicInteger, AtomicReference, etc). This is a niche
method that is sometimes useful when fine-tuning code using
non-blocking data structures. The semantics are
that the write is guaranteed not to be re-ordered with any
previous write, but may be reordered with subsequent operations
(or equivalently, might not be visible to other threads) until
some other volatile write or synchronizing action occurs).

The main use case is for nulling out fields of nodes in
non-blocking data structures solely for the sake of avoiding
long-term garbage retention; it applies when it is harmless
if other threads see non-null values for a while, but you'd
like to ensure that structures are eventually GCable. In such
cases, you can get better performance by avoiding
the costs of the null volatile-write. There are a few
other use cases along these lines for non-reference-based
atomics as well, so the method is supported across all of the
AtomicX classes.

For people who like to think of these operations in terms of
machine-level barriers on common multiprocessors, lazySet
provides a preceeding store-store barrier (which is either
a no-op or very cheap on current platforms), but no
store-load barrier (which is usually the expensive part
of a volatile-write)."
###@###.### 2005-05-24 17:04:20 GMT