how to cast away 'volatile'?

[Matthew Woehlke]

Andrew Haley wrote:
> I suppse we have to ask the OP why he's using volatile.

Ok, I guess I should answer that. It's part of a typedef that is 
essentially 'typedef volatile long atom_t', i.e. the type that is passed 
to atomicAdd, atomicSwap, etc functions (which are of course written 
with inline assembler using 'lock' - the memory barriers are handled). 
Also because atomicRead is a no-op to simply read the value, since this 
is safe. So I'm expecting 'volatile' to a: discourage compilers from 
doing stupid reordering to the code, like say putting the read before a 
call to atomicXyz, and b: force a re-read from memory (in case some 
other thread is changing the value) rather than using a cached value.

Now I'm wondering if maybe I should just drop the volatile, but I'm not 
sure I trust doing that...? Michael Eager's post makes it sound like I 
am in exactly the few cases where use of 'volatile' is appropriate.

Oh, and did I mention I'm actually implementing lightweight mutexes? :-) 
I can't use pthread mutexes; this code is supposed to build on Windows 
and Solaris also (Solaris has pthread mutexes but not the FAST/ADAPTIVE 
type AFAIK).

-- 
Matthew
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