Why does volatile exist?

From a "Volatile as a promise" article by Dan Saks:

(...) a volatile object is one whose value might change spontaneously. That is, when you declare an object to be volatile, you're telling the compiler that the object might change state even though no statements in the program appear to change it."

Here are links to three of his articles regarding the volatile keyword:

• Use volatile judiciously
• Place volatile accurately
• Volatile as a promise

volatile is needed if you are reading from a spot in memory that, say, a completely separate process/device/whatever may write to.

I used to work with dual-port ram in a multiprocessor system in straight C. We used a hardware managed 16 bit value as a semaphore to know when the other guy was done. Essentially we did this:

void waitForSemaphore()
{
   volatile uint16_t* semPtr = WELL_KNOWN_SEM_ADDR;/*well known address to my semaphore*/
   while ((*semPtr) != IS_OK_FOR_ME_TO_PROCEED);
}

Without volatile, the optimizer sees the loop as useless (The guy never sets the value! He's nuts, get rid of that code!) and my code would proceed without having acquired the semaphore, causing problems later on.

Some processors have floating point registers that have more than 64 bits of precision (eg. 32-bit x86 without SSE, see Peter's comment). That way, if you run several operations on double-precision numbers, you actually get a higher-precision answer than if you were to truncate each intermediate result to 64 bits.

This is usually great, but it means that depending on how the compiler assigned registers and did optimizations you'll have different results for the exact same operations on the exact same inputs. If you need consistency then you can force each operation to go back to memory by using the volatile keyword.

It's also useful for some algorithms that make no algebraic sense but reduce floating point error, such as Kahan summation. Algebraicly it's a nop, so it will often get incorrectly optimized out unless some intermediate variables are volatile.

volatile is needed when developing embedded systems or device drivers, where you need to read or write a memory-mapped hardware device. The contents of a particular device register could change at any time, so you need the volatile keyword to ensure that such accesses aren't optimised away by the compiler.