Rationale (October, 2015)

SG1 reaffirms the original intent of this specification.

According to 6.9.2 [intro.multithread] paragraph 24,

The implementation may assume that any thread will eventually do one of the following:

• terminate,

• make a call to a library I/O function,

• access or modify a volatile object, or

• perform a synchronization operation or an atomic operation.

[Note: This is intended to allow compiler transformations such as removal of empty loops, even when termination cannot be proven. —end note]

Some programmers find this liberty afforded to implementations to be disadvantageous; see this blog post for a discussion of the subject.