There are two main uses of AtomicInteger
:
As an atomic counter (incrementAndGet()
, etc) that can be used by many threads concurrently
As a primitive that supports compare-and-swap instruction (compareAndSet()
) to implement non-blocking algorithms.
Here is an example of non-blocking random number generator from Brian Göetz's Java Concurrency In Practice:
public class AtomicPseudoRandom extends PseudoRandom {
private AtomicInteger seed;
AtomicPseudoRandom(int seed) {
this.seed = new AtomicInteger(seed);
}
public int nextInt(int n) {
while (true) {
int s = seed.get();
int nextSeed = calculateNext(s);
if (seed.compareAndSet(s, nextSeed)) {
int remainder = s % n;
return remainder > 0 ? remainder : remainder + n;
}
}
}
...
}
As you can see, it basically works almost the same way as incrementAndGet()
, but performs arbitrary calculation (calculateNext()
) instead of increment (and processes the result before return).