An Interesting Thing with Groovy For Loops and Threads
This site utilizes Google Analytics, Google AdSense, as well as participates in affiliate partnerships with various companies including Amazon. Please view the privacy policy for more details.
An interesting thing happened the other day when I was spinning off threads in a Groovy for loop.
Now I can’t show you exactly what I was doing (proprietary code and all that), but I can reproduce the affect for this blog post.
Take this simple Groovy loop, which doesn’t use threads:
class ForLoopWithMultithreading {
def doRun() {
def I = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
for (def i : I) {
System.out.print(i + "\t")
}
}
}
new ForLoopWithMultithreading().doRun()
The output is exactly what I’d expect:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Now let’s put the contents of the for loop inside a separate thread:
class ForLoopWithMultithreading {
def doRun() {
def I = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
for (def i : I) {
new Thread(new Runnable() {
public void run() {
System.out.print(i + "\t")
}
}).start()
}
}
}
new ForLoopWithMultithreading().doRun()
// Make sure the main thread remains active while the other threads complete.
Thread.sleep(1000)
While I wouldn’t expect the numbers to be in order, I’d expect to see each number exactly once. But I don’t - instead I get something like:
3 3 4 5 3 7 7 8 9 9
Of course, your results might vary.
To rectify this, I put the contents of the for loop into its own method:
class ForLoopWithMultithreading {
def doRun() {
def I = [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
for (def i : I) {
process(i)
}
}
def process(Integer i) {
new Thread(new Runnable() {
public void run() {
System.out.print(i + "\t")
}
}).start()
}
}
new ForLoopWithMultithreading().doRun()
// Make sure the main thread remains active while the other threads complete.
Thread.sleep(1000)
Now I get each number outputted exactly once, albeit out of order (which is expected):
0 1 4 3 2 5 6 7 8 9
For fun, I wanted to reproduce this in Java. Which, because of the nature of Java, was hard to do. Local variables defined in an enclosing scope must be final or effectively final and all that.
But I was able to use an “effectively final” variable that could also change - that is, a single-element array:
public class ForLoopWithMultithreading {
public static void main(String... args) {
int[] I = new int[1];
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
I[0] = i;
new Thread(() -> System.out.print(I[0] + "\t")).start();
}
}
}
And here is my output:
3 5 5 3 7 4 7 9 9 9
Of course, I’d never expect to see this in production code…
Leave a Reply
