If by volatile you mean "don't use volatile for this" and "use std::atomic", then I agree completely!

Perhaps azth is writing C?

C has atomic types now also. And I believe in general that volatile only prevents elision of reads and stores, but not optimization in general. That works for many cases (and I think it would work here) but it doesn't solve data races in general.

C11 has atomics which works similarly to C++11's.

Sure but the vast majority of C out there is C89/90/99.