rustc compiler intrinsics.

The corresponding definitions are in librustc/middle/trans/foreign.rs.

Volatiles

The volatile intrinsics provide operations intended to act on I/O memory, which are guaranteed to not be reordered by the compiler across other volatile intrinsics. See the LLVM documentation on [volatile].

Atomics

The atomic intrinsics provide common atomic operations on machine words, with multiple possible memory orderings. They obey the same semantics as C++11. See the LLVM documentation on [atomics].

A quick refresher on memory ordering:

• Acquire - a barrier for acquiring a lock. Subsequent reads and writes take place after the barrier.
• Release - a barrier for releasing a lock. Preceding reads and writes take place before the barrier.
• Sequentially consistent - sequentially consistent operations are guaranteed to happen in order. This is the standard mode for working with atomic types and is equivalent to Java's volatile.