At a high level - fail-fast is a property of a system or software with respect to its response to failures. A fail-fast system is designed to immediately report any failure or condition that is likely to lead to failure. Fail-fast systems are usually designed to stop normal operation rather than attempt to continue a possibly-flawed process. When a problem occurs, a fail-fast system fails immediately and visibly. Failing fast is a non-intuitive technique: "failing immediately and visibly" sounds like it would make your software more fragile, but it actually makes it more robust. Bugs are easier to find and fix, so fewer go into production. In Java, Fail-fast term can be related to context of iterators. If an iterator has been created on a collection object and some other thread tries to modify the collection object "structurally", a concurrent modification exception will be thrown. It is possible for other threads though to invoke "set" method since it doesn't modify the collection "structurally". However, if prior to calling "set", the collection has been modified structurally, "IllegalArgumentException" will be thrown.
I am quite familiar with Fail-safe devices. Often this is safety -oriented or related devices and most of the time there are number on fail-safe devices installed into a system. During a typical/ normal operation, if one system fails, the other devices kicks in to take care of-- that is to correct the situation.
Fail-fast property is typically a detection devices or indicators showing when a system fails to operate as designed. Fail-fast property is often used as a trigger to launch some of the fail-safe devices.
Hope this answers your question. If not please elaborate...
Brian
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