For me, this quote is the hard-earned kernel of wisdom that affirms what I've been saying about transactional memory for the last three years: "Why make the cod

For me, this quote is the hard-earned kernel of wisdom that affirms what I've been saying about transactional memory for the last three years: "Why make the code XTN-friendly when they can make it lock-friendly as well, and have it run fine on all gear (and not just HTM-enabled gear)? Also locks have well understood performance characteristics, unlike TM's which generally rely on a complex and not-well-understood runtime portion (and indeed all the STMs out there have wildly varying "sweet spots" such that code which performs well on one STM might be really unusably slow on another STM)." Transactional memory sounds appealing to programmers who've worked hard on making lock-based systems scale because the grass is always greener. Locks sound easy, too, until you try to build a huge system with them. It sounds like Azul has built the first industrial scale TM implementation, and done it with some of the best and brightest, but has not found the going significantly easier or faster than with traditional methods.