Question

Use of volatile only makes sense in multiprocessor systems. is this wrong?

i’m trying to learn about thread programming, so if you know any good articles/pdfs … i like stuff that mentions a bit about how the operating system works as well not just the language’s syntax.

Answer 1

volatile is used to ensure all thread see the same copy of the data. If there is only one thread reading/writing to a field, it doesn’t need to be volatile. It will work just fine, just be a bit slower.

In Java you don’t have much visibility as to the processor architecture, generally you talk in terms of threads and multi-threading.

I suggest Java Concurrency in Practice, it good whatever your level of knowledge, http://www.javaconcurrencyinpractice.com/

The whole point of using Java is you don’t need to know most of the details of how threads work etc. If you learn lots of stuff you don’t use you are likely to forget it. 😉