Surprisingly "Difference between transient and volatile keyword in Java" has asked many times on various java interviews. volatile and transient are two completely different keywords from different areas of Java programming language. the transient keyword is used during serialization of Java object while volatile is related to the visibility of variables modified by multiple threads during concurrent programming. The only similarity between volatile and transient is that they are less used or uncommon keywords and not as popular as public, static, or final.
Anyway, its good to know what transient keyword do in Java or how to use volatile keyword in Java. In this article, we will couple of points between volatile and transient which can be used to answer this interview question.
Anyway, its good to know what transient keyword do in Java or how to use volatile keyword in Java. In this article, we will couple of points between volatile and transient which can be used to answer this interview question.
This article is in continuation of earlier interview questions on serialization like the difference between Serializable and Externalizable and Top 10 Java serialization interview questions. If you haven’t read them already you may find them useful and interesting.
And, if you want to learn more, you can always see these Java Multithreading and Concurrency courses, where I have shared both beginner and advance courses to improve your multithreading skills.
Difference between volatile and transient keywords in Java
1) transient keyword is used along with instance variables to exclude them from the serialization process. if a field is transient its value will not be persisted. see my post on what is a transient keyword in java for more details.
On the other hand, the volatile keyword can also be used in variables to indicate compiler and JVM that always read its value from the main memory and follow happens-before relationship on the visibility of volatile variables among multiple threads.
On the other hand, the volatile keyword can also be used in variables to indicate compiler and JVM that always read its value from the main memory and follow happens-before relationship on the visibility of volatile variables among multiple threads.
You can further see my post on how and when to use volatile keyword in Java for more details.
2) transient keywords can not be used along with static keywords but volatile can be used along with static.
3) transient variables are initialized with default value during de-serialization and their assignment or restoration of value has to be handled by application code.
That’s all on the difference between transient and volatile keywords in java. As I said this interview question doesn’t really test you and just try to find whether you are familiar with those less known keywords in java or not. And, ,Please let me know if you come across any other difference between volatile and transient keywords in Java.
Other discussions on Java interview questions you may like
And lastly, let me know if you have been asked this question before? or what is your favorite Java interview question?
9 comments :
transient keyword CAN be used along with static keyword...
@Suraj, syntactically yes transient can be used with static but there is no point of doing that as transient keyword is used to prevent any field from serialization and static variables are not serialized anyway. By the way thanks for bringing this point.
my query is where JRE maintain .class file for annotation
@Javin : even though it doesn't make any sense but writing that transient can't be used with static itself is wrong.
@Anonymous, if you are thinking from compiler's point of view then yes, you can pair static and transient together, but why would you do that? transient is used to prevent a field from being serialized and static fields are not serialized anyway.
@Javin Wouldn't it make more sense to say that using the transient keyword with the static keyword is redundant, instead of not possible?
@Javin the author needs to modify that statement, i thought it would throw compilation error, but it works normally .
if i dont want to use transcient keyword ,then any other option not to make variable serialised.
@Anonymous, you can make them static if your logic allows that.
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