net.jcip.annotations.Immutable Maven / Gradle / Ivy
package net.jcip.annotations;
import java.lang.annotation.*;
/*
* Copyright (c) 2005 Brian Goetz and Tim Peierls
* Released under the Creative Commons Attribution License
* (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)
* Official home: http://www.jcip.net
*
* Any republication or derived work distributed in source code form
* must include this copyright and license notice.
*/
/**
* The class to which this annotation is applied is immutable. This means that
* its state cannot be seen to change by callers, which implies that
*
* - all public fields are final,
* - all public final reference fields refer to other immutable objects, and
* - constructors and methods do not publish references to any internal state
* which is potentially mutable by the implementation.
*
* Immutable objects may still have internal mutable state for purposes of performance
* optimization; some state variables may be lazily computed, so long as they are computed
* from immutable state and that callers cannot tell the difference.
*
* Immutable objects are inherently thread-safe; they may be passed between threads or
* published without synchronization.
*/
@Documented
@Target(ElementType.TYPE)
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface Immutable {
}