Language constructs for transactional memory

Abstract

Building concurrent shared-memory data structures is a notoriously difficult problem, and so the widespread move to multi-core and multi-processor hardware has led to increasing interest in language constructs that may make concurrent programming easier. One technique that has been studied widely is the use of atomic blocks built over transactional memory (TM): the programmer marks a section of code as atomic, and the language implementation speculatively executes it using transactions. Transactions can run in parallel so long as they access different data.