Comment by hedora

In java, the caller gets the reference before the constructor runs. It's in the language spec. It's terrible. You can prove it yourself with something like:

   this.dangerous = new Lol();

and then have Lol()'s constructor sleep for 10 sec then set done = true at the end of the contstructor. In another thread:

   while(!this.dangerous) { }
   assert(this.done) // will throw.

I guess you could use double-checked locking as a class author by having every public method on your class do a if (!this.done) { throw; }, and make sure there are no public fields.

That's pretty lame though.