Microsoft has been doing extensive research with STM, so their work might be worth looking at along the way. A working STM package (STM.NET) was actually shippe

Microsoft has been doing extensive research with STM, so their work might be worth looking at along the way. A working STM package (STM.NET) was actually shipped with VS2010, where you can type this: Atomic.Do(() => { /* atomic code */ }) Here's some channel 9 videos about their progress, which are in of themselves very interesting: http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Software-Transactional-Memory-The-Current-State-of-the-Art http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Software-Transacti... http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/STMNET-Who-What-Why http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/STMNET-Who-What-Why And here are some research papers published by Tim Harris and the old STM research blog: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/tharris/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/tharris/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/stmteam/archive/2010/05/12/stm-net-devlab-incubation-complete.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/stmteam/archive/2010/05/12/stm-net-d... Fascinating stuff. I'm wary of having it be at the core of Python, but very interested to see where PyPy ends up.