In Java Concurrency In Practice by Brian Goetz, why is the Memoizer class not annotated with @ThreadSafe?

Question

Java Concurrency In Practice by Brian Goetz provides an example of a efficient scalable cache for concurrent use. The final version of the example showing the implementation for class Memoizer (pg 108) shows such a cache. I am wondering why the class is not annotated with @ThreadSafe? The client, class Factorizer, of the cache is properly annotated with @ThreadSafe. The appendix states that if a class is not annotated with either @ThreadSafe or @Immutable that it should be assumed that it isn't thread safe. Memoizer seems thread-safe though.

Here is the code for Memoizer:

public class Memoizer<A, V> implements Computable<A, V> {
private final ConcurrentMap<A, Future<V>> cache
    = new ConcurrentHashMap<A, Future<V>>();
private final Computable<A, V> c;

public Memoizer(Computable<A, V> c) { this.c = c; }

public V compute(final A arg) throws InterruptedException {
    while (true) {
        Future<V> f = cache.get(arg);
        if (f == null) {
            Callable<V> eval = new Callable<V>() {
                public V call() throws InterruptedException {
                    return c.compute(arg);
                }
            };
            FutureTask<V> ft = new FutureTask<V>(eval);
            f = cache.putIfAbsent(arg, ft);
            if (f == null) { f = ft; ft.run(); }
        }
        try {
            return f.get();
        } catch (CancellationException e) {
            cache.remove(arg, f);
        } catch (ExecutionException e) {
            throw launderThrowable(e.getCause());
        }
    }
}

}

Answer 1

It certainly looks thread-safe. If I recall correctly, in this particular version of Memoizer, Goetz was showing the use of cache.putIfAbsent to avoid a race condition between the get and put methods of the cache.

As the others have pointed out, it may have been left out and you'll have to rely on the commentary in the book to see whether this is the 'good' version.