static final volatile int foo = 1;

It's likely that my compiler treats foo as though it were just static final, and if you do not understand how a final volatile variable differs from a plain final, then congratulations.

The problem is that although people generally think of static final variables as constants, they aren't quite constant: foo is assigned its value early in the life of the application and can never be reassigned and, but if two or more classes reference each other, so that each class has to be initialised before the other, then code involved in that initialisation may see foo still being 0. This is usually an unpleasant surprise, found while debugging. volatile affects the visibility of the foo=1 assignment, and it probably forbids one of the things my compiler does to handle those loops.

I can fix it and I probably will, although I will not be highly motivated: It's a minor problem, and quite frankly, people whose code depends on the semantics of static final volatile ought to go for a walk in the park and reconsider that aspect of their design.