Practical uses for AtomicInteger

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There are two main uses of AtomicInteger:

  • As an atomic counter (incrementAndGet(), etc) that can be used by many threads concurrently

  • As a primitive that supports compare-and-swap instruction (compareAndSet()) to implement non-blocking algorithms.

    Here is an example of non-blocking random number generator from Brian Göetz’s Java Concurrency In Practice:

    public class AtomicPseudoRandom extends PseudoRandom {
    private AtomicInteger seed;
    AtomicPseudoRandom(int seed) {
        this.seed = new AtomicInteger(seed);
    }

    public int nextInt(int n) {
        while (true) {
            int s = seed.get();
            int nextSeed = calculateNext(s);
            if (seed.compareAndSet(s, nextSeed)) {
                int remainder = s % n;
                return remainder > 0 ? remainder : remainder + n;
            }
        }
    }
    ...
}

    As you can see, it basically works almost the same way as incrementAndGet(), but performs arbitrary calculation (calculateNext()) instead of increment (and processes the result before return).

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