[0xFEE1DEAD]

> on internal, legacy codebases, enterprisey stuff

Or anything that breaks the norm really.

I recently wrote something where I updated a variable using atomic primitives. Because it was inside a hot path I read the value without using atomics as it was okay for the value to be stale. I handed it the code because I had a question about something unrelated and it wouldn't stop changing this piece of code to use atomic reads. Even when I prompted it not to change the code or explained why this was fine it wouldn't stop.

[atq2119]

FWIW, and this depends on the language obviously, but formal memory models typically do forbid races between atomic and non-atomic accesses to the same memory location.

While what you were doing may have been fine given your context, if you're targeting e.g. standard C++, you really shouldn't be doing it (it's UB). You can usually get the same result with relaxed atomic load/store.

(As far as AI is concerned, I do agree that the model should just have followed your direction though.)