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This noncompliant code example implements an idle task that continuously executes a loop without executing any instructions within the loop. An optimizing compiler or JIT could remove the while loop in this example.

public int nop() {
  while (true) {}
}

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This compliant solution avoids use of a meaningless infinite loop by invoking Thread.sleep() within the while loop. The loop body contains semantically meaningful operations and consequently cannot be optimized away.

public final int DURATION=10000; // inIn milliseconds

public void nop() throws InterruptedException {
  while (true) {
    // Useful operations
    Thread.sleep(DURATION);
  }
}

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This compliant solution invokes Thread.yield(), which causes the thread running this method to consistently defer to other threads.:

public void nop() {
  while (true) {
    Thread.yield();
  }
}

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Bibliography

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