java - What is the point of making the singleton instance volatile while using double lock?

Question

(This question already has answers here): question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11639746/what-is-the-point-of-making-the-singleton-instance-volatile-while-using-double-l

Answer 1

The volatile prevents memory writes from being re-ordered, making it impossible for other threads to read uninitialized fields of your singleton through the singleton's pointer.

Consider this situation: thread A discovers that uniqueInstance == null, locks, confirms that it's still null, and calls singleton's constructor. The constructor makes a write into member XYZ inside Singleton, and returns. Thread A now writes the reference to the newly created singleton into uniqueInstance, and gets ready to release its lock.

Just as thread A gets ready to release its lock, thread B comes along, and discovers that uniqueInstance is not null. Thread B accesses uniqueInstance.XYZ thinking that it has been initialized, but because the CPU has reordered writes, the data that thread A has written into XYZ has not been made visible to thread B. Therefore, thread B sees an incorrect value inside XYZ, which is wrong.

When you mark uniqueInstance volatile, a memory barrier is inserted. All writes initiated prior to that of uniqueInstance will be completed before the uniqueInstance is modified, preventing the reordering situation described above.