What is mutex and semaphore in Java ? What is the main difference?

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Unfortunately everyone has missed the most important difference between the semaphore and the mutex; the concept of “ownership“.

Semaphores have no notion of ownership, this means that any thread can release a semaphore (this can lead to many problems in itself but can help with “death detection”). Whereas a mutex does have the concept of ownership (i.e. you can only release a mutex you have acquired).
Ownership is incredibly important for safe programming of concurrent systems. I would always recommend using mutex in preference to a semaphore (but there are performance implications).

Mutexes also may support priority inheritance (which can help with the priority inversion problem) and recursion (eliminating one type of deadlock).

It should also be pointed out that there are “binary” semaphores and “counting/general” semaphores. Java’s semaphore is a counting semaphore and thus allows it to be initialized with a value greater than one (whereas, as pointed out, a mutex can only a conceptual count of one). The usefulness of this has been pointed out in other posts.

So to summarize, unless you have multiple resources to manage, I would always recommend the mutex over the semaphore.

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