What is meant by immutable?

Question

This could be the dumbest question ever asked but I think it is quite confusing for a Java newbie.

1. Can somebody clarify what is meant by immutable? <

Answer 1

Objects which are immutable can not have their state changed after they have been created.

There are three main reasons to use immutable objects whenever you can, all of which will help to reduce the number of bugs you introduce in your code:

• It is much easier to reason about how your program works when you know that an object's state cannot be changed by another method
• Immutable objects are automatically thread safe (assuming they are published safely) so will never be the cause of those hard-to-pin-down multithreading bugs
• Immutable objects will always have the same Hash code, so they can be used as the keys in a HashMap (or similar). If the hash code of an element in a hash table was to change, the table entry would then effectively be lost, since attempts to find it in the table would end up looking in the wrong place. This is the main reason that String objects are immutable - they are frequently used as HashMap keys.

There are also some other optimisations you might be able to make in code when you know that the state of an object is immutable - caching the calculated hash, for example - but these are optimisations and therefore not nearly so interesting.