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JavaIntermediate#concurrency

What are atomic classes like AtomicInteger used for?

They provide lock-free, thread-safe operations on single variables using CAS (compare-and-swap) hardware instructions, avoiding the overhead of synchronized blocks for simple counters or flags.

Example
AtomicInteger counter = new AtomicInteger(0);
counter.incrementAndGet();
counter.compareAndSet(1, 5); // sets to 5 only if current value is 1

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