- Are you planning any addition regarding modeling of how modern CPUs work (e.g. pipelines, branches, speculative execution, cache lines, etc)?
PS: Thank you for doing this!
For me, I think it's 'volatile' because, by its nature, you can't describe what it means in the abstract machine very well. For instance, consider a proposal to add something like a "secure clear" function for clearing out sensitive data. The natural inclination is to pretend that data is volatile so the optimizer won't dead-code strip your secure clear function call, but that leaves questions about things like cache lines, distributed memory, etc.
> - Are you planning any addition regarding modeling of how modern CPUs work (e.g. pipelines, branches, speculative execution, cache lines, etc)?
Maybe? ;-) We tend to talk about features at a higher level of abstraction than the hardware because hardware changes at such a rapid pace compared to the standards process. So we largely leave hardware-specific considerations as a matter of QoI for implementers.
However, that doesn't mean we wouldn't consider proposals for more concrete things like a defensive attribute to help mitigate speculative execution attacks.