How can an immutable object, with non-final fields, be thread unsafe?

Question

say we have this

// This is trivially immutable.
public class Foo {
    private String bar;
    public Foo(String bar) {
        this.bar = bar;
    }
    pu         


        

Answer 1

Foo is thread safe once it has been safely published. For example, this program could print "unsafe" (it probably won't using a combination of hotspot/x86) - if you make bar final it can't happen:

public class UnsafePublication {

    static Foo foo;

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new Thread(new Runnable() {
            @Override
            public void run() {
                while (foo == null) {}
                if (!"abc".equals(foo.getBar())) System.out.println("unsafe");
            }
        }).start();

        new Thread(new Runnable() {
            @Override
            public void run() {
                foo = new Foo("abc");
            }
        }).start();
    }
}