Question

I’ve declared a volatile array of node based data structures.

volatile Node[] name;

For the most part, I don’t need each individual node to be volatile because I update the entire array when it needs to be updated.

name = new array of nodes;

Rarely, I will need to update a field inside a specific node of the array, but no other thread will need to read this field for at least several minutes. Can I assume that at this point, whatever change I’ve made would be visible to other threads?

Answer 1

In the case you describe, the volatile keyword on name doesn’t come into play at all. Your use of volatile will only be relevant on reads from and writes to name, neither of which are done when accessing some field of some element in name.

If you need to read guarantees on some field in some element of name, you really need to make that field volatile.