What are best practices for working with race conditions and visibility?

Race conditions and visibility issues can lead to inconsistent behavior in concurrent systems. Here are some best practices to mitigate these problems:

• Use Synchronized Blocks: By synchronizing blocks of code, you can prevent multiple threads from executing them simultaneously, thus avoiding race conditions.
• Atomic Variables: Use atomic variables for shared data that needs to be accessed by multiple threads. This ensures that read and write operations are completed atomically.
• Thread Local Variables: Utilize ThreadLocal for storage of data that is specific to a thread, keeping it isolated from other threads.
• Volatile Keyword: Mark variables as volatile to ensure that changes made by one thread are visible to others immediately.
• Locks and Semaphores: Use higher-level constructs like ReentrantLock or CountDownLatch that offer a more flexible locking mechanism compared to traditional synchronized methods.
• Immutable Objects: Design your classes to be immutable. Shared immutable objects do not cause race conditions since their state cannot change after construction.
• Proper Documentation: Document your code thoroughly to inform others about concurrency strategies used, which helps others understand and maintain the code.

Implementing these best practices can greatly improve the stability and reliability of concurrent applications.