Today, I'm going to talk about what volatile means in Java. I've sort-of covered this in other posts, such as my posting on the ++ operator , my post on double-checked locking and the like, but I've never really addressed it directly. First, you have to understand a little something about the Java memory model. I've struggled a bit over the years to explain it briefly and well. As of today, the best way I can think of to describe it is if you imagine it this way: Each thread in Java takes place in a separate memory space (this is clearly untrue, so bear with me on this one). You need to use special mechanisms to guarantee that communication happens between these threads, as you would on a message passing system. Memory writes that happen in one thread can "leak through" and be seen by another thread, but this is by no means guaranteed. Without explicit communication, you can't guarantee which writes get seen by other threads, or even the order in whic
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@BegemoT The slides worked for me.