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Composable Memory Transactions.

Writing concurrent programs is notoriously difficult and is of increasing practical importance. A particular source of concern is that even correctly implemented concurrency abstractions cannot be composed together to form larger abstractions. In this paper we present a concurrency model, based on t...

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Published in:Communications of the ACM Vol. 51; no. 8; pp. 91 - 101
Main Authors: Harris, Tim, Marlow, Simon, Jones, Simon Peyton, Herlihy, Maurice
Format: Article
Published: Association for Computing Machinery Aug2008
Subjects:
Parallel programs (Computer programs)
Computer memory management
Threads (Computer programs)
Computer programming
Parallel algorithms
Software engineering
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Summary:Writing concurrent programs is notoriously difficult and is of increasing practical importance. A particular source of concern is that even correctly implemented concurrency abstractions cannot be composed together to form larger abstractions. In this paper we present a concurrency model, based on transactional memory, that offers far richer composition. All the usual benefits of transactional memory are present (e.g., freedom from low-level deadlock), but in addition we describe modular forms of blocking and choice that were inaccessible in earlier work.