DIP62: Volatile type qualifier for unoptimizable variables in embedded programming

[ponce via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 15 July 2014 at 21:28:24 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> Peek/poke has a 40 year history of being used for MMIO, and 
> I've never heard of it being used for concurrency. I don't 
> think there's endemic confusion, quite unlike volatile.

There is a huge confusion about volatile in the native space. No 
one really knows what it does and when it should be used, because 
it's kind of rare.

I've seen pervasive volatile use make some GPU kernels 100x 
slower. Programming by coincidence, sure, but _explicit_ 
barriers, being read/write/optimizer barriers, I find them much 
better. volatile is more like denial, and importing the history 
behind the keyword would negative PR. Pascal had no volatile, and 
using &= from a memory-mapped location doesn't exactly scream 
"performance".