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To add to this: Java’s original collection classes (Vector, Hashtable, …) were thread-safe, but it turned out that the performance penalty for that was too high, all the while still not catching errors when performing combinations of operations that need to be a single atomic transaction. This was one of the motivations for the thread-unsafe classes of the newer collection framework (ArrayList, HashMap, …).

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> still not catching errors when performing combinations of operations that need to be a single atomic transaction

This is so important. The idea that code is thread-safe just because it uses a thread-safe data structure, and its cousin "This is thread-safe, because I have made all these methods synchronized" are... not frequent, but I've seen them expressed more often than I'd like, which is zero times.

Shows up in other places as well, such as file systems. Trying to check if a filename exists, and if it doesn't then create the file for example. Instead one should simply try to create the file and handle the error if it already exists.

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