Learning Concurrent Programming in Scala - Second Edition

Summary

In this chapter, we learned how STM works and how to apply it in concurrent programs. We saw the advantages of using STM's transactional references and atomic blocks over the synchronized statements, and investigated their interaction with side effects. We studied the semantics of exception handling inside transactions and learned how to retry and conditionally re-execute transactions. Finally, we learned about transactional collections, which allow us to encode shared program data more efficiently.

These features together enable a concurrent programming model in which the programmer can focus on expressing the meaning of the program, without having to worry about handling lock objects, or avoiding deadlocks and race conditions. This is ...