[concurrency-interest] Making copy of a reference to ReentrantLock

[Navin Jha]

I was looking at the CopyOnWriteArrayList.java source code and I see that in all the modification methods a copy of the lock is made first, something like:

public E set(int index, E element) {
                final ReentrantLock lock = this.lock;
                lock.lock();
................................... // rest of the method

I understand that making local copies of object variables would reduce contention but is that the reason for doing this in this case or something else?

Regards,
Navin

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