On 11/30/10 3:15 PM, Kenton Varda wrote:
To answer your questions: 1) It is thread-safe. 2) No locking or other synchronization overhead is involved.The string data is stored as an Object pointer which, at any particular time, may point at either a String or a ByteString. When one form or the other is requested, we convert the representation to that form if necessary, then return it. In other words: String getFoo() { Object ref = foo; if (ref instanceof String) { return (String) ref; } else { String str = ((ByteString) ref).toStringUtf8(); foo = str; return str; } } This is thread-safe because the Java memory model guarantees that pointer writes are atomic, even for non-volatile pointers (otherwise you'd have a potential security hole!). If two threads happen to try to access the field at the same time, the worst that can happen is that they will both decode the string independently. Since they'll get the same result, it doesn't matter which of the two pointers is stored long-term. (Although, clients that expect getters to consistently return the same object, as opposed to just equal objects, may be broken. But people should not be doing that anyway.) We checked with Jeremy Manson to make sure this implementation works. Working at Google is awesome like that. :)
Great :) Thanks for answering my questions. I see this is the same technique String#hashCode() uses.
This looks like a very minor amount of overhead, not worth having a method that forces the conversion of all strings in a message.
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