Transactional programming

This chapter introduces transactional programming. Transactional programming raises the level of abstraction, letting a programmer focus on which regions of code must be atomic, and not how to make those regions atomic. By shifting responsibility for achieving atomicity to a run-time library, transactional programming overcomes many limitations and pathologies associated with locks and nonblocking techniques. We consider two categories of transactional programming: transactional lock elision and transactional memory. We also discuss run-time support for transactions, both hardware and software, and show how to build a scalable transactional memory run-time system.