Effective Java! Override clone judiciously

Today we are talking about the Cloneable interface and it related clone function. Honestly I haven't interacted any with this method in the past and after learning about it I'm not sure I really want to, it seems quite error prone. So let's dive in and understand this method so that we can make intelligent decisions about whether to use this method or not.

So what is the Cloneable interface. It is a mixin interface that signals to users of the class that a certain action can be performed on the class. The extremely weird thing about this particular mixin is that, rather than requiring the implementation of a particular function, it merely acts as a flag that allows the implementing class to call a method on the parent class. What this means is that a user of the class that implements Cloneable can't necessarily always call the clone method on that class without resorting to reflection and even then that might not work. All this being said, this is a part of the Object class so it pays to understand it and know how to implement the method as well as what the alternatives are. This chapter of Effective Java goes through that.

So what is the contract of Cloneable? As we learned above it doesn't include any methods but instead acts as a flag to the protected clone method in the Object class. If a class calls the clone on Object and that class implements Cloneable, Object's implementation of clone will return a field-by-field copy of the object. If the class does not implement Cloneable, a CloneNotSupportedException…