Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Beware of slightly different behaviour between ConcurrentMap and ConcurrentHashMap for computeIfAbsent

So I was refactoring some code to use non-locking collection classes and I noticed the this significant different between ConcurrentMap.computeIfAbsent and ConcurrentHashMap.computeIfAbsent. They key different is that for the former default implementing the mapping function can be called many times for a particular key where as for the concrete implementation it will be called only once. This will likely affect whether the code in the function needs to be thread safe or not.

Right okay so armed with that you know that any collection that implements just ConcurrentMap will inherit this behaviour, further to that I found in particular guava would return a different implementation depending on the passed on parameters:

ConcurrentMap map1 = new MapMaker().makeMap();
System.out.println(map1.getClass());

ConcurrentMap map2 = new MapMaker().weakKeys().makeMap();
System.out.println(map2.getClass());

....

class java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentHashMap
class com.google.common.collect.MapMakerInternalMap

MapMakerInternalMap doesn't override computerIfAbsent therefore the behaviour of this function will be significantly different depending on the parameters to pass into the maker, something that might be apparent from the get go.

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