Why must wait() always be in synchronized block

Question

We all know that in order to invoke Object.wait(), this call must be placed in synchronized block, otherwise an IllegalMonitorStateException is thrown. But what\'s t

Answer 1

This basically has to do with the hardware architecture (i.e. RAM and caches).

If you don't use synchronized together with wait() or notify(), another thread could enter the same block instead of waiting for the monitor to enter it. Moreover, when e.g. accessing an array without a synchronized block, another thread may not see the changement to it...actually another thread will not see any changements to it when it already has a copy of the array in the x-level cache (a.k.a. 1st/2nd/3rd-level caches) of the thread handling CPU core.

But synchronized blocks are only one side of the medal: If you actually access an object within a synchronized context from a non-synchronized context, the object still won't be synchronized even within a synchronized block, because it holds an own copy of the object in its cache. I wrote about this issues here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/21462631 and When a lock holds a non-final object, can the object's reference still be changed by another thread?

Furthermore, I'm convinced that the x-level caches are responsible for most non-reproducible runtime errors. That's because the developers usually don't learn the low-level stuff, like how CPU's work or how the memory hierarchy affects the running of applications: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hierarchy

It remains a riddle why programming classes don't start with memory hierarchy and CPU architecture first. "Hello world" won't help here. ;)