What’s the (hidden) cost of Scala’s lazy val?

This is taken from the scala mailing list and gives implementation details of lazy in terms of Java code (rather than bytecode):

class LazyTest {
  lazy val msg = "Lazy"
}

is compiled to something equivalent to the following Java code:

class LazyTest {
  public int bitmap$0;
  private String msg;

  public String msg() {
    if ((bitmap$0 & 1) == 0) {
        synchronized (this) {
            if ((bitmap$0 & 1) == 0) {
                synchronized (this) {
                    msg = "Lazy";
                }
            }
            bitmap$0 = bitmap$0 | 1;
        }
    }
    return msg;
  }

}