The method to which this annotation is applied acquires one or more locks. The caller will hold the locks when the function finishes execution.

This annotation does not apply to built-in (synchronization) locks, which cannot be acquired without being released in the same method.

The arguments determine which locks the annotated method acquires:

• field-name: The lock is referenced by the final instance field specified by field-name.
• class-name.this.field-name: For inner classes, it may be necessary to disambiguate 'this'; the class-name.this designation allows you to specify which 'this' reference is intended.
• class-name.field-name: The lock is referenced by the static final field specified by class-name.field-name.
• method-name(): The lock object is returned by calling the named nullary method.