It is interesting to see that some aspects (mostly unintended) can stimulate lots of good and fruitful discussions. So this happened with “Spilling the Beans: Endless Loops” (recommended to read 🙂 where using (or not using) volatile for inline assembly created thoughts which warrant an article on that subject.

The volatile qualifier in C/C++ is misunderstood by many programmers, or wrongly used.

Still, ‘volatile’ is very useful if you know what it means for the compiler and what is good use of it.