Compare and Swap is one of the new approaches (Java 5) introduced in java to handle synchronization. In traditional approach, a method which modifies a member variable used by multiple threads is completely synchronized – to prevent other threads accessing stale value.
In compare and swap approach, instead of synchronizing entire method, the value of the member variable before calculation is cached. After the calculation, the cached value is compared with the current value of member variable. If the value is not modified, the calculated result is stored into the member variable. If another thread has modified the value, then the calculation can be performed again. Or skipped – as the need might be.
ConcurrentLinkedQueue uses this approach.
