guava-libraries: is Iterators.cycle() thread-safe?

guava, iterator, java, thread-safety

Solution

Pretty much nothing in Guava is guaranteed to be thread safe unless documented as such.

You do not have to synchronize the entire bar method, but you should wrap the call to iterator.next() in a synchronized block. eg:

public void bar(){  
    Integer value;
    synchronized (iterator) {
        value = iterator.next();  
    }
    doSomethingWithAnInteger(value);
}

Problem

Suppose I have the following class: ``` public class Foo { private List<Integer> list = Lists.newArrayList(1, 2, 3, 4, 5); private Iterator<Integer> iterator = Iterators.cycle(list); public void bar(){ Integer value = iterator.next(); doSomethingWithAnInteger(value); } } ``` If an instance of Foo is acessed simultaneously by two threads, I need that each thread gets a different value from `iterator.next()`. Does the `bar()` method have to be made synchronized? Or is `iterator.next()` guaranteed to be thread-safe? In this example, I am using an ArrayList as the underlying `Iterable`. Does the thread-safety of the cyclic iterator depend on the specific iterable implementation?

Original source