What is the purpose of a volatile variable in Java?

[chirag-garg]

Volatile is a special modifier, which can only be used with instance variables. In concurrent Java programs, changes made by multiple threads on instance variables is not visible to other in absence of any synchronizers e.g. synchronized keyword or locks.

Using volatile is yet another way (like synchronized, atomic wrapper) of making class thread safe. Thread safe means that a method or class instance can be used by multiple threads at the same time without any problem.