When do I need to use AtomicBoolean in Java?

Question

How I can use AtomicBoolean and what is that class for?

Answer 1

Excerpt from the package description

Package java.util.concurrent.atomic description: A small toolkit of classes that support lock-free thread-safe programming on single variables.[...]

The specifications of these methods enable implementations to employ efficient machine-level atomic instructions that are available on contemporary processors.[...]

Instances of classes AtomicBoolean, AtomicInteger, AtomicLong, and AtomicReference each provide access and updates to a single variable of the corresponding type.[...]

The memory effects for accesses and updates of atomics generally follow the rules for volatiles:

• get has the memory effects of reading a volatile variable.
• set has the memory effects of writing (assigning) a volatile variable.
• weakCompareAndSet atomically reads and conditionally writes a variable, is ordered with respect to other memory operations on that variable, but otherwise acts as an ordinary non-volatile memory operation.
• compareAndSet and all other read-and-update operations such as getAndIncrement have the memory effects of both reading and writing volatile variables.