volatile is truly a semantic mess. The effective definition of "suppresses optimizations" is difficult to work with, because the boundary between an optimizatio

volatile is truly a semantic mess. The effective definition of "suppresses optimizations" is difficult to work with, because the boundary between an optimization and weird feature interactions is incredibly murky. (e.g., don't ask what happens with volatile bitfields. Just don't.) It's better to replace it with things that have clearer semantics, even if they don't have the full functionality. The use of dedicated atomic intrinsics is one such clear replacement. Indeed I've worked with hardware where it was more obvious how to lower an atomic load or store than it was to lower a volatile load or store, because the technical definition of volatile really doesn't comport with the practical meaning of "don't optimize this" (crazy hardware does things like that).