4 ms·
A (brief) retrospective on transactional memory
- scott_s 17y agoThis is an excellent overview of the very real difficulties of implementing software transactional memory in practice, and the implications that has for users of STM. Personally, I've always been skeptical about how easy it will be to both use and implement STM in a language and platform. Simple cases are easy, but the semantics of things like nested transactions get hairy fast. While I agree that it's doable to use STM to synchronize a program, I'm still not convinced it's easier than using locks.
- Maro 17y agoI'm always excited to read about STM. It is my opinion that a startup could make a decent living off STM, given that it wouldn't have to support a large, existing ecosystem like Microsoft. Lots of papers have been written, there are probably open-source implementations out there, and it's a very nice problem to work on.