Martin Abadi gives seminar on Transactional Memory
Several recent designs and systems based on transactions aim to facilitate the writing of concurrent programs. In particular, software transactional memory STM) appears as an intriguing alternative to locks and related constructs for shared-memory concurrency. In this context, we are exploring a model that we call Automatic Mutual Exclusion (AME), in which transactional execution is the default. This talk presents AME and the underlying semantics and implementation strategies. It also discusses the programming disciplines (various forms of separation) that are required for ensuring the correctness of those implementation strategies.