How to implement thread-safe lazy initialization?

Question

What are some recommended approaches to achieving thread-safe lazy initialization? For instance,

// Not thread-safe
public Foo getI         


        

Answer 1

With Java 8 we can achieve lazy initialization with thread safety. If we have Holder class and it needs some heavy resources then we can lazy load the heavy resource like this.

public class Holder {
    private Supplier<Heavy> heavy = () -> createAndCacheHeavy();

    private synchronized Heavy createAndCacheHeavy() {

        class HeavyFactory implements Supplier<Heavy> {
            private final Heavy heavyInstance = new Heavy();

            @Override
            public Heavy get() {
                return heavyInstance;
            }
        }
        if (!HeavyFactory.class.isInstance(heavy)) {
            heavy = new HeavyFactory();
        }
        return heavy.get();
    }

    public Heavy getHeavy() {
        return heavy.get();
    }
}

public class Heavy {
    public Heavy() {
        System.out.println("creating heavy");
    }
}

Answer 2

Try to defined the method which gets an instance as synchronized:

public synchronized Foo getInstance(){
   if(INSTANCE == null){
    INSTANCE = new Foo();
  }

  return INSTANCE;
 }

Or use a variable:

private static final String LOCK = "LOCK";
public synchronized Foo getInstance(){
  synchronized(LOCK){
     if(INSTANCE == null){
       INSTANCE = new Foo();
     }
  }
  return INSTANCE;
 }

Answer 3

The easiest way is to use a static inner holder class :

public class Singleton {

    private Singleton() {
    }

    public static Singleton getInstance() {
        return Holder.INSTANCE;
    }

    private static class Holder {
        private static final Singleton INSTANCE = new Singleton();
    }
}

Answer 4

Put the code in a synchronized block with some suitable lock. There are some other highly specialist techniques, but I'd suggest avoiding those unless absolutely necessary.

Also you've used SHOUTY case, which tends to indicate a static but an instance method. If it is really static, I suggest you make sure it isn't in any way mutable. If it's just an expensive to create static immutable, then class loading is lazy anyway. You may want to move it to a different (possibly nested) class to delay creation to the absolute last possible moment.

Answer 5

If you're using Apache Commons Lang, then you can use one of the variations of ConcurrentInitializer like LazyInitializer.

Example:

ConcurrentInitializer<Foo> lazyInitializer = new LazyInitializer<Foo>() {

        @Override
        protected Foo initialize() throws ConcurrentException {
            return new Foo();
        }
    };

You can now safely get Foo (gets initialized only once):

Foo instance = lazyInitializer.get();

If you're using Google's Guava:

Supplier<Foo> fooSupplier = Suppliers.memoize(new Supplier<Foo>() {
    public Foo get() {
        return new Foo();
    }
});

Then call it by Foo f = fooSupplier.get();

From Suppliers.memoize javadoc:

Returns a supplier which caches the instance retrieved during the first call to get() and returns that value on subsequent calls to get(). The returned supplier is thread-safe. The delegate's get() method will be invoked at most once. If delegate is an instance created by an earlier call to memoize, it is returned directly.

Answer 6

Here is one more approach which is based on one-time-executor semantic.

The full solution with bunch of usage examples can be found on github (https://github.com/ManasjyotiSharma/java_lazy_init). Here is the crux of it:

“One Time Executor” semantic as the name suggests has below properties:

1. A wrapper object which wraps a function F. In current context F is a function/lambda expression which holds the initialization/de-initialization code.

2. The wrapper provides an execute method which behaves as:

   • Calls the function F the first time execute is called and caches the output of F.
   • If 2 or more threads call execute concurrently, only one “gets in” and the others block till the one which “got in” is done.
   • For all other/future invocations of execute, it does not call F rather simply returns the previously cached output.

3. The cached output can be safely accessed from outside of the initialization context.

This can be used for initialization as well as non-idempotent de-initialization too.

import java.util.Objects;
import java.util.concurrent.CountDownLatch;
import java.util.concurrent.atomic.AtomicBoolean;
import java.util.concurrent.atomic.AtomicReference;
import java.util.function.Function;

/**
 * When execute is called, it is guaranteed that the input function will be applied exactly once. 
 * Further it's also guaranteed that execute will return only when the input function was applied
 * by the calling thread or some other thread OR if the calling thread is interrupted.
 */

public class OneTimeExecutor<T, R> {  
  private final Function<T, R> function;
  private final AtomicBoolean preGuard;
  private final CountDownLatch postGuard;
  private final AtomicReference<R> value;

  public OneTimeExecutor(Function<T, R> function) {
    Objects.requireNonNull(function, "function cannot be null");
    this.function = function;
    this.preGuard = new AtomicBoolean(false);
    this.postGuard = new CountDownLatch(1);
    this.value = new AtomicReference<R>();
  }

  public R execute(T input) throws InterruptedException {
    if (preGuard.compareAndSet(false, true)) {
      try {
        value.set(function.apply(input));
      } finally {
        postGuard.countDown();
      }
    } else if (postGuard.getCount() != 0) {
      postGuard.await();
    }
    return value();
  }

  public boolean executed() {
    return (preGuard.get() && postGuard.getCount() == 0);
  }

  public R value() {
    return value.get();
  }

}  

Here is a sample usage:

import java.io.BufferedWriter;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.OutputStreamWriter;
import java.io.PrintWriter;
import java.nio.charset.StandardCharsets;

/*
 * For the sake of this example, assume that creating a PrintWriter is a costly operation and we'd want to lazily initialize it.
 * Further assume that the cleanup/close implementation is non-idempotent. In other words, just like initialization, the 
 * de-initialization should also happen once and only once.
 */
public class NonSingletonSampleB {
  private final OneTimeExecutor<File, PrintWriter> initializer = new OneTimeExecutor<>(
    (File configFile) -> {
      try { 
        FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(configFile);
        OutputStreamWriter osw = new OutputStreamWriter(fos, StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
        BufferedWriter bw = new BufferedWriter(osw);
        PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(bw);
        return pw;
      } catch (IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        throw new RuntimeException(e);
      }
    }
  );  

  private final OneTimeExecutor<Void, Void> deinitializer = new OneTimeExecutor<>(
    (Void v) -> {
      if (initializer.executed() && null != initializer.value()) {
        initializer.value().close();
      }
      return null;
    }
  );  

  private final File file;

  public NonSingletonSampleB(File file) {
    this.file = file;
  }

  public void doSomething() throws Exception {
    // Create one-and-only-one instance of PrintWriter only when someone calls doSomething().  
    PrintWriter pw = initializer.execute(file);

    // Application logic goes here, say write something to the file using the PrintWriter.
  }

  public void close() throws Exception {
    // non-idempotent close, the de-initialization lambda is invoked only once. 
    deinitializer.execute(null);
  }

}

For few more examples (e.g. singleton initialization which requires some data available only at run-time thus unable to instantiate it in a static block) please refer to the github link mentioned above.