Is the != check thread safe?

Question

I know that compound operations such as i++ are not thread safe as they involve multiple operations.

But is checking the reference with itself a t

Answer 1

No, a != a is not thread safe. This expression consists of three parts: load a, load a again, and perform !=. It is possible for another thread to gain the intrinsic lock on a's parent and change the value of a in between the 2 load operations.

Another factor though is whether a is local. If a is local then no other threads should have access to it and therefore should be thread safe.

void method () {
    int a = 0;
    System.out.println(a != a);
}

should also always print false.

Declaring a as volatile would not solve the problem for if a is static or instance. The problem is not that threads have different values of a, but that one thread loads a twice with different values. It may actually make the case less thread-safe.. If a isn't volatile then a may be cached and a change in another thread won't affect the cached value.