What's the usecase of volatile operations on std::atomic?

Question

There has been a lot of debate going on concerning the usefulness of volatile in multi-threaded code. Most people agree, that the principal usecases of volatile are mostly for bare metal applications such as device drivers and interrupt handlers, but not to make a variable of built-in type thread-safe. In fact, volatile has lead to much confusion because of this.

However, it has been added to function overloads of std::atomic<T> types, which suggests that there be a usecase for this. What are usecases of these operations?

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 20 '15 at 21:02

There is a general usefulness to volatile in the sense that compiler MUST not optimise away accesses to that variable. However, in this case, I think it's mainly because the input MAY be volatile - just like in case of const, you can "add" but not "remove" volatile attribute to a passed in paramater.

Thus:

int foo(volatile int *a)
{
    ... 
}

will accept:

int x;
volatile int y;

foo(&x);
foo(&y);

where if you didn't write volatile, the compiler should not accept the foo(&y); variant.

What's the usecase of volatile operations on std::atomic?

1 Answers1