Why does ConcurrentHashMap prevent null keys and values?

I believe it is, at least in part, to allow you to combine containsKey and get into a single call. If the map can hold nulls, there is no way to tell if get is returning a null because there was no key for that value, or just because the value was null.

Why is that a problem? Because there is no safe way to do that yourself. Take the following code:

if (m.containsKey(k)) {
   return m.get(k);
} else {
   throw new KeyNotPresentException();
}

Since m is a concurrent map, key k may be deleted between the containsKey and get calls, causing this snippet to return a null that was never in the table, rather than the desired KeyNotPresentException.

Normally you would solve that by synchronizing, but with a concurrent map that of course won't work. Hence the signature for get had to change, and the only way to do that in a backwards-compatible way was to prevent the user inserting null values in the first place, and continue using that as a placeholder for "key not found".

Josh Bloch designed HashMap; Doug Lea designed ConcurrentHashMap. I hope that isn't libelous. Actually I think the problem is that nulls often require wrapping so that the real null can stand for uninitialized. If client code requires nulls then it can pay the (admittedly small) cost of wrapping nulls itself.

You can't synchronize on a null.

Edit: This isn't exactly why in this case. I initially thought there was something fancy going on with locking things against concurrent updates or otherwise using the Object monitor to detect if something was modified, but upon examining the source code it appears I was wrong - they lock using a "segment" based on a bitmask of the hash.

In that case, I suspect they did it to copy Hashtable, and I suspect Hashtable did it because in the relational database world, null != null, so using a null as a key has no meaning.

I guess that the following snippet of the API documentation gives a good hint: "This class is fully interoperable with Hashtable in programs that rely on its thread safety but not on its synchronization details."

They probably just wanted to make ConcurrentHashMap fully compatible/interchangeable to Hashtable. And as Hashtable does not allow null keys and values..

ConcurrentHashMap is thread-safe. I believe that not allowing null keys and values was a part of making sure that it is thread-safe.

I don't think disallowing null value is a correct option. In many cases, we do want do put a key with null value into the con-current map. However, by using ConcurrentHashMap, we cannot do that. I suggest that the coming version of JDK can support that.