/*
 * Copyright 2015 Google Inc. All Rights Reserved.
 *
 * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
 * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 * You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *
 *     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 *
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */
package com.google.errorprone.annotations;

import static java.lang.annotation.ElementType.TYPE;
import static java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME;

import java.lang.annotation.Inherited;
import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
import java.lang.annotation.Target;

/**
 * The class to which this annotation is applied is immutable.
 *
 * <p>An object is immutable if its state cannot be observed to change after construction. Immutable
 * objects are inherently thread-safe.
 *
 * <p>A class is immutable if all instances of that class are immutable. The immutability of a class
 * can only be fully guaranteed if the class is final, otherwise one must ensure all subclasses are
 * also immutable.
 *
 * <p>A conservative definition of object immutability is:
 *
 * <ul>
 *   <li>All fields are final;
 *   <li>All reference fields are of immutable type, or null;
 *   <li>It is <em>properly constructed</em> (the {@code this} reference does not escape the
 *       constructor).
 * </ul>
 *
 * <p>The requirement that all reference fields be immutable ensures <em>deep</em> immutability,
 * meaning all contained state is also immutable. A weaker property, common with container classes,
 * is <em>shallow</em> immutability, which allows some of the object's fields to point to mutable
 * objects. One example of shallow immutability is guava's ImmutableList, which may contain mutable
 * elements.
 *
 * <p>It is possible to implement immutable classes with some internal mutable state, as long as
 * callers can never observe changes to that state. For example, some state may be lazily
 * initialized to improve performance.
 *
 * <p>It is also technically possible to have an immutable object with non-final fields (see the
 * implementation of {@link String#hashCode()} for an example), but doing this correctly requires
 * subtle reasoning about safe data races and deep knowledge of the Java Memory Model.
 *
 * <p>Use of this annotation is validated by <a
 * href="http://errorprone.info/bugpattern/Immutable">Error Prone's immutability analysis</a>, which
 * ensures that all {@code @Immutable}-annotated classes are deeply immutable according to the
 * conservative definition above. Non-final classes may be annotated with {@code @Immutable}, and
 * any code compiled by Error Prone will be checked to ensure that no mutable subtypes of
 * {@code @Immutable}-annotated classes exist.
 *
 * <p>For more information about immutability, see:
 *
 * <ul>
 *   <li>Java Concurrency in Practice §3.4
 *   <li>Effective Java §15
 * </ul>
 */
@Target(TYPE)
@Retention(RUNTIME)
@Inherited
public @interface Immutable {

  /**
   * When annotating a generic type as immutable, {@code containerOf} specifies
   * which type parameters must be instantiated with immutable types for the
   * container to be deeply immutable.
   */
  String[] containerOf() default {};
}