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Volatile in C

In C, the volatile keyword indicates that a value may change between different accesses, even if it does not appear to be modified.
The volatile keyword prevents the compiler from performing optimization on code involving volatile objects, thus ensuring that each volatile variable assignment and read has a corresponding memory access(Wikipedia reference).
It is intended to prevent the compiler from applying any optimizations on objects that can change in ways that cannot be determined by the compiler.
For example a global variable can represent a data port (usually global pointer referred as memory mapped IO) which will be updated dynamically. The code reading data port must be declared as volatile in order to fetch latest data available at the port..
Below is a demo which shows how the compiler will behave when there is volatile or not
Obviously without volatile the four variable was optimized by the compiler so they are not shown in the assembly code, but with volatile keyword, the four variable was not optimized so everyone has a location in memory stack.
Without volatile
With volatile
int main() {
/* These variables will never be created on stack*/
int a = 10, b = 100, c = 0, d = 0;
/* "printf" will be called with arguments "%d" and
110 (the compiler computes the sum of a+b),
hence no overhead of performing addition at
run-time */
printf("%d", a + b);
/* This code will be removed via optimization, but
the impact of 'c' and 'd' becoming 100 can be
seen while calling "printf" */
a = b;
c = b;
d = b;
/* Compiler will generate code where printf is
called with arguments "%d" and 200 */
printf("%d", c + d);
return 0;
}
/*
Corresponding assembly code is:
sub rsp, 8
mov esi, 110
mov edi, OFFSET FLAT:.LC0
xor eax, eax
call printf
mov esi, 200
mov edi, OFFSET FLAT:.LC0
xor eax, eax
call printf
xor eax, eax
add rsp, 8
int main() {
volatile int a = 10, b = 100, c = 0, d = 0;
printf("%d", a + b);
a = b;
c = b;
d = b;
printf("%d", c + d);
return 0;
}
/*
Corresponding assembly code :
sub rsp, 24
mov edi, OFFSET FLAT:.LC0
mov DWORD PTR [rsp], 10
mov DWORD PTR [rsp+4], 100
mov DWORD PTR [rsp+8], 0
mov DWORD PTR [rsp+12], 0
mov esi, DWORD PTR [rsp]
mov eax, DWORD PTR [rsp+4]
add esi, eax
xor eax, eax
call printf
mov eax, DWORD PTR [rsp+4]
mov edi, OFFSET FLAT:.LC0
mov DWORD PTR [rsp], eax
mov eax, DWORD PTR [rsp+4]
mov DWORD PTR [rsp+8], eax
mov eax, DWORD PTR [rsp+4]
mov DWORD PTR [rsp+12], eax
mov esi, DWORD PTR [rsp+8]
mov eax, DWORD PTR [rsp+12]
add esi, eax
xor eax, eax
call printf
xor eax, eax
add rsp, 24
*/