Volatile is a hacky way to avoid optimizations and plays hell with normal language semantics. For example, you can't memcpy or memset volatile pointers or point

Volatile is a hacky way to avoid optimizations and plays hell with normal language semantics. For example, you can't memcpy or memset volatile pointers or pointers to volatiles. Imo if you don't want the compiler to optimize something, tell it not to. For example in GCC: __attribute__((optimize("-O0"), noinline)) void zero_memory(void* memory, size_t sz) { memset(memory, 0, sz); } If you wanted to make that portable, there are equivalents in clang and msvc so you'd want to use some #defines here and there. Of course disabling optimizations/inlining in functions has a performance hit, but I think if you're so concerned with code being ignored the tradeoff is appropriate.