Re:Never trust a programmer who says he knows C++
by gridspy on Monday March 29, 2010 @10:47PM
(#1228210)
And a good programmer will raise his eyebrow at you and coolly reply "a little less optimisation"
Re:Never trust a programmer who says he knows C++
by jmtulloss on Tuesday March 30, 2010 @02:45AM
(#1228565)
I'm a C programmer, not a C++ one, but at least in C, you sometimes need volatile to have a correct program.
Re:Never trust a programmer who says he knows C++
by gridspy on Tuesday March 30, 2010 @03:59PM
(#1229996)
Indeed.
The underling effect of volatile is that the compiler turns off certain optimisations to do with instruction reordering and aggressive caching in registers without stores.
However in most places that a typical non-firmware, non-driver programmer would use volatile they really should be using a memory fence (acquire, release or atomic store).
At university, they taught me C++. I suffered a lot. So the minute I graduated, I stopped doing it. This was a valuable lesson after all.
If someone pretends to understand C++, just look at his code and say "Ok, so what happens if you add 'volatile' just here."