If I am interacting with shared memory, gcc doesn't know if another process changes values. This creates issues for optimization. I know that "volatile" can help address this, but it winds up causing a giant mess of other problems (like, for instance, I can't pass a volatile into memcpy.. or pretty much anything else from the standard libraries). So for instance, if I do something stupidly simple like busy-wait on a shm value to change: while (shm->index == oldindex) ; gcc will kill that loop. For simple things like this, and much more complicated things beyond it, is there a way to cast something to "volatile" for one particular usage?
