I also programmed in Java. From what I can tell, there is little difference between Java and C++ in this regard. The terminology is just different. What you call "monitor", "volatile" and "happens before" in Java is called "mutex", "amotic" and "sequenced before". On top of that C++11 allows you to use "weaker synchronization". But that's something I choose to ignore because it's just too easy to get it wrong and not worth the performance gain in my opinion.
Cheers! Sebastian
Volatile in C/C++ is not sequenced like atomics in Java. In many cases the observed behavior on x86 platforms will be similar, but this is by chance. C++11 and boost have std/boost::atomic, which will match the behavior of Java atomics. C++11 and boost also have a std/boost::mutex implementation. Lee