LShift Ltd.

Restartable Nested STM Transactions

November 4th, 2005 matthias

I’ve just finished reading Versioned Boxes as the Basis for Memory Transactions, which proposes some neat extensions to the STM model to make it more suitable for applications with long-running transaction and high contention. It also solves another problem of traditional STMs by guaranteeing that transactions will always see a consistent state during execution.

These innovations bring STMs closer to being a universal memory model, as discussed here. They do, of course, come at a price. There is significantly more bookkeeping involved, and it is also not yet clear whether a efficient lock-free implementation, like in simpler STM models, is possible. Overall though the approach looks very promising.

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