Lazy Array Initialization

Lazy object initialization is one of the important strategy to avoid upfront allocation and it can become little tricky if multiple threads are involved.

Some of the language like scala has language level support for lazy variable and compiler generates thread safe code for you but in java some coding is required to achieve this.

ConcurrentHashMap of JDK7 does upfront allocation of segment object and it adds to memory footprint of empty collection but in JDK8 lazy val strategy is used for initialization to save some memory for empty collection.

So what code is used to do allocation in thread safe way ? It is simple but it has some fine details that is worth looking at, below is code snippet that is used in ConcurrentHashMap


It has check on array length because that is written after memory allocation is done.

Code used in blog is available @ github