I came across an interesting behaviour of threads in James Roper’s Blog (http://jazzy.id.au/pebble/2009/04/24/java_concurrency_and_volatile.html).  Tested it on Vista 64 bit machine and without a volatile keyboard, in my machine also the code goes into an infinite loop.

public class ThreadExperiement implements Runnable {

	private volatile String str;
    void setStr(String str)
    {
        this.str = str;
    }
    public void run()
    {
        while (str == null){}
        System.out.println(str);

    }
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception
    {
    	ThreadExperiement threadExp = new ThreadExperiement();
        new Thread(threadExp).start();
        Thread.sleep(1000);
        threadExp.setStr("Hello world!!");
    }

}

Put a print statement inside the while loop and it starts working. Strange , isn’t it?

Is it because of byte code optimisation which detects that there is nothing to do inside the loop ?