Android: What does “Volatile” mean?
At work, I’m currently working on a very large project, and a lot of it was previously written by some very experienced programmers, far beyond my level of skill. When I read through it, I often come across weird things I’ve never seen before (a lot of which gives me the content to post here!) One of these I cam across recently was this word:
volatile
Its a strange prefix to a variable name, and the first few times I looked it up, I was not able to find a clear or concise answer. When I try to compile it into simple programs, it never yielded any visible differences. I have found this article from Javamex which put together a rather simple table and explanation of what it actually does.
Essentially, volatile is used to indicate that a variable’s value will be modified by different threads.
Briefly, I can tell you it is related to threads and synchronization, so if your programs don’t have a lot of multi thread functionality, this keyword *probably doesn’t affect you. Check out the article here and feel free to toss in any comments to shed light some more light for our readers!
-Kevin Grant