[android-developers] Re: Lunar Lander Example - Thread Safety

Yes, it's thread-safe because setting a boolean is an atomic operation.

On Sunday, September 16, 2012 11:36:09 AM UTC-5, sdb wrote:

I'm new to android development and have been studying the Lunar Lander example included in the SDK to get a better understanding of how the SurfaceView works.  I noticed that the mRun member of the LunarThread class is updated by the setRunnable() method of the LunarThread class which is called from the LunarView class within the surfaceCreated() and surfaceDestroyed() methods.

It seems to me that mRun is being updated by the main thread for the SurfaceView, but is being repeatedly read in a tight loop in LunarThread.  My question is: is this use of mRun thread safe and if so, why/how?

I'm not sure, but maybe it is thread safe because mRun is a simple boolean variable and is only updated from one of the two threads involved.  If mRun was a more complext object and/or it was being updated by different by both threads,then perhaps this example would not be thread safe without the use of some form of synchronization mechanism.

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