JavaBlogging

Before I say anything I want to share with you a code snippet that is a simplified version of something I have recently wrote in my work. There is a small, yet painful bug in this code… can you see it?

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public static class Point implements Comparable<Point> {
    private int x, y;

    public Point(int x, int y) {
        this.x = x;
        this.y = y;
    }

    @Override
    public int compareTo(Point other) {
        if (this.x != other.x) {
            return this.x - other.x;
        } else {
            return this.y - other.y;
        }
    }

    @Override
    public boolean equals(Object obj) {
        if (!(obj instanceof Point)) return false;
        Point other = (Point) obj;
        return (this.x == other.x && this.y == other.y);
    }

    @Override
    public int hashCode() {
        return 31 * x + y;
    }
}

This is a simple value class represanting a point. At first glance everything is good with it: the hash function is not sophisticated, but it is correct and legal. The equals() method is written ‘by the book’ so it is probably OK. The class implements Comparable interface and defines a lexicographic order of the points – the code of compareTo() is standard and fulfills the contract of the interface. All three methods are compatible with each other: hash codes of equal points are equal, comparisons are transitive, if A.compareTo(B) == 0 then A.equals(B)… Basically all is fine, so where is the bug? Is there any bug at all?

Unfortunatelly there is a bug in this code. What is worse you probably read about it many times (’Effective Java’ item 11, ‘Java Puzzlers’ puzzle 65, the list goes on an on…). The problem with this code is that substraction based comparators are BAD as they often exposes you to danger of an overflow. This is what happens in this case – see the following:

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public static void main(String[] args) {
    Point pZero  = new Point(0, 0);
    Point pPlus  = new Point(2000000000, 0);
    Point pMinus = new Point(-2000000000, 0);

    System.out.println( pPlus.compareTo(pZero) > 0 );
    System.out.println( pZero.compareTo(pMinus) > 0 );
    System.out.println( pPlus.compareTo(pMinus) > 0 );
  }

We are comparing in this code three points. When you look at the declaration of those object you can already see the order of them: pPlus > pZero > pMinus. Just to be sure we check it by printing to console the result of compareTo() function. If you execute this code you’ll get that as expected ‘true’ for pPlus > pZero and ‘true’ for pZero > pMinus. The suprizing thing is the last comparison that evaluates to false. This is because of the integer overflow: in pPlus.compareTo(pMinus) the result value is 2000000000 – (-2000000000) == -294967296! Scary, right?