Software Transactional Memory

Definition

Software transactional memory (STM) is a method of concurrency control in which shared-memory accesses are grouped into transactions which either succeed or fail to commit in their entirety. STM provides applications programmers with an alternative to mutual-exclusion locks which avoids many of the latter's pitfalls, including risk of deadlock, unnecessary serialization, and priority inversion. Many STMs are themselves implemented using lock-free programming methods, although this is not a hard-and-fast rule.

Key Points

A software transactional memory (STM) is a software library or programming language feature which provides application programmers with an interface for allocating and accessing shared-memory variables [3]. These variables are accessible in a concurrency-safe manner without resorting to classical concurrency-management techniques such as mutual exclusion. This is achieved by grouping accesses into transactions which execute in isolation and then atomically...