Does this basic Java object pool work?

Question

Does the following basic object pool work? I have a more sophisticated one based on the same idea (i.e. maintaining both a Semaphore and a BlockingQueue). My question is - do I need both Semaphore and BlockingQueue? Am I right that I don't need to do any synchronisation?

import java.util.Collection;
import java.util.concurrent.ArrayBlockingQueue;
import java.util.concurrent.BlockingQueue;
import java.util.concurrent.Semaphore;

public final class Pool<T> {

    private final BlockingQueue<T> objects;
    private final Semaphore permits;

    public Pool(Collection<? extends T> objects) {
        // we have as many permits as objects in our pool:
        this.permits = new Semaphore(objects.size());
        this.objects = new ArrayBlockingQueue<T>(objects.size(), false, objects);
    }

    public T borrow() {
        this.permits.acquireUninterruptibly();
        // we have a permit, so there must be one in there:
        return this.objects.poll();
    }

    public void giveBack(T object) {
        this.objects.add(object);
        this.permits.release();
    }
}

Answer 1

As has been pointed out, a bounded BlockingQueue alone would be sufficient. For example, the following code will do what you want:

import java.util.Collection;
import java.util.concurrent.ArrayBlockingQueue;
import java.util.concurrent.BlockingQueue;

public final class Pool<T> {

    private final BlockingQueue<T> objects;

    public Pool(Collection<? extends T> objects) {
        this.objects = new ArrayBlockingQueue<T>(objects.size(), false, objects);
    }

    public T borrow() throws InterruptedException {
        return this.objects.take();
    }

    public void giveBack(T object) throws InterruptedException {
        this.objects.put(object);
    }
}

Also, you might want to consider supporting a timed version of borrow() using BlockingQueue.poll().

If you didn't have a bounded blocking queue data structure, then you can impose a semaphore on top of any data structure to create a thread safe and bound behavior.