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

An immutable object is the one you cannot modify after you create it. A typical example are string literals.

A D programming language, which becomes increasingly popular, has a notion of "immutability" through "invariant" keyword. Check this Dr.Dobb's article about it - http://dobbscodetalk.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=Invariant-Strings.html&Itemid=29 . It explains the problem perfectly.

Answer 2

Actually String is not immutable if you use the wikipedia definition suggested above.

String's state does change post construction. Take a look at the hashcode() method. String caches the hashcode value in a local field but does not calculate it until the first call of hashcode(). This lazy evaluation of hashcode places String in an interesting position as an immutable object whose state changes, but it cannot be observed to have changed without using reflection.

So maybe the definition of immutable should be an object that cannot be observed to have changed.

If the state changes in an immutable object after it has been created but no-one can see it (without reflection) is the object still immutable?

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

An immutable object is an object where the internal fields (or at least, all the internal fields that affect its external behavior) cannot be changed.

There are a lot of advantages to immutable strings:

Performance: Take the following operation:

String substring = fullstring.substring(x,y);

The underlying C for the substring() method is probably something like this:

// Assume string is stored like this:
struct String { char* characters; unsigned int length; };

// Passing pointers because Java is pass-by-reference
struct String* substring(struct String* in, unsigned int begin, unsigned int end)
{
    struct String* out = malloc(sizeof(struct String));
    out->characters = in->characters + begin;
    out->length = end - begin;
    return out;
}

Note that none of the characters have to be copied! If the String object were mutable (the characters could change later) then you would have to copy all the characters, otherwise changes to characters in the substring would be reflected in the other string later.

Concurrency: If the internal structure of an immutable object is valid, it will always be valid. There's no chance that different threads can create an invalid state within that object. Hence, immutable objects are Thread Safe.

Garbage collection: It's much easier for the garbage collector to make logical decisions about immutable objects.

However, there are also downsides to immutability:

Performance: Wait, I thought you said performance was an upside of immutability! Well, it is sometimes, but not always. Take the following code:

foo = foo.substring(0,4) + "a" + foo.substring(5);  // foo is a String
bar.replace(4,5,"a"); // bar is a StringBuilder

The two lines both replace the fourth character with the letter "a". Not only is the second piece of code more readable, it's faster. Look at how you would have to do the underlying code for foo. The substrings are easy, but now because there's already a character at space five and something else might be referencing foo, you can't just change it; you have to copy the whole string (of course some of this functionality is abstracted into functions in the real underlying C, but the point here is to show the code that gets executed all in one place).

struct String* concatenate(struct String* first, struct String* second)
{
    struct String* new = malloc(sizeof(struct String));
    new->length = first->length + second->length;

    new->characters = malloc(new->length);

    int i;

    for(i = 0; i < first->length; i++)
        new->characters[i] = first->characters[i];

    for(; i - first->length < second->length; i++)
        new->characters[i] = second->characters[i - first->length];

    return new;
}

// The code that executes
struct String* astring;
char a = 'a';
astring->characters = &a;
astring->length = 1;
foo = concatenate(concatenate(slice(foo,0,4),astring),slice(foo,5,foo->length));

Note that concatenate gets called twice meaning that the entire string has to be looped through! Compare this to the C code for the bar operation:

bar->characters[4] = 'a';

The mutable string operation is obviously much faster.

In Conclusion: In most cases, you want an immutable string. But if you need to do a lot of appending and inserting into a string, you need the mutability for speed. If you want the concurrency safety and garbage collection benefits with it the key is to keep your mutable objects local to a method:

// This will have awful performance if you don't use mutable strings
String join(String[] strings, String separator)
{
    StringBuilder mutable;
    boolean first = true;

    for(int i = 0; i < strings.length; i++)
    {
        if(!first) first = false;
        else mutable.append(separator);

        mutable.append(strings[i]);
    }

    return mutable.toString();
}

Since the mutable object is a local reference, you don't have to worry about concurrency safety (only one thread ever touches it). And since it isn't referenced anywhere else, it is only allocated on the stack, so it is deallocated as soon as the function call is finished (you don't have to worry about garbage collection). And you get all the performance benefits of both mutability and immutability.

Answer 5

I really like the explaination from SCJP Sun Certified Programmer for Java 5 Study Guide.

To make Java more memory efficient, the JVM sets aside a special area of memory called the "String constant pool." When the compiler encounters a String literal, it checks the pool to see if an identical String already exists. If a match is found, the reference to the new literal is directed to the existing String, and no new String literal object is created.