safe publication and the advantage of being immutable vs. effectively immutable

Question

I\'m re-reading Java Concurrency In Practice, and I\'m not sure I fully understand the chapter about immutability and safe publication.

What the book says is:

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Answer 1

I had the exact same question as the original poster when finishing reading chapters 1-3 . I think the authors could have done a better job elaborating on this a bit more.

I think the difference lies therein that the internal state of effectively immutable objects can be observed to be in an inconsistent state when they are not safely published whereas the internal state of immutable objects can never be observed to be in an inconsistent state.

However I do think the reference to an immutable object can be observed to be out of date / stale if the reference is not safely published.