Replace AtomicBoolean by primitive type when only the get() and set() methods are used?

Question

My code contains some AtomicBoolean fields. Only the get() and set() methods of these fields are called.

Can the types of these fields safely be replaced by primitive boolean?

I mean, assignment and access operations of primitive booleans are atomic operations in Java. And from that point of view I cannot see any reason to use AtomicBoolean in my case.

In my understanding AtomicBoolean would only make sense if methods like compareAndSet are used, that combine a comparison and access. Am I wrong about that? Could you explain why?

Answer 1

Atomic variables are described as "better volatiles" in Java Concurrency in Practice (see section 15.3). Here is an extract from this book:

The atomic variable classes provide a generalization of volatile variables to support atomic conditional read-modify-write operations. AtomicInteger represents an int value, and provides get and set methods with the same memory semantics as reads and writes to a volatile int.

Applied to your case this means that if you're using only get() and set() methods of AtomicBoolean, they can be safely replaced with read-writes to volatile boolean.

volatile is needed to guarantee that all threads will see up-to-date value of the variable. Back to Java Concurrency in Practice (section 3.1.4):

When a field is declared volatile, the compiler and runtime are put on notice that this variable is shared and that operations on it should not be reordered with other memory operations. Volatile variables are not cached in registers or in caches where they are hidden from other processors, so a read of a volatile variable always returns the most recent write by any thread.