Why is reference assignment atomic in Java?

Question

As far as I know reference assignment is atomic in a 64 bit JVM. Now, I assume the jvm doesn\'t use atomic pointers internally to model this, since otherwise there would be no n

Answer 1

Atomic reference assignment is in the specs.

Writes to and reads of references are always atomic, regardless of whether they are implemented as 32 or 64 bit values.

Quoted from JSR-133: Java(TM) Memory Model and Thread Specification, section 12 Non-atomic Treatment of double and long, http://www.cs.umd.edu/~pugh/java/memoryModel/jsr133.pdf.