18
Transactional Memory
18.1 Introduction
We now turn our attention from devising data structures and algorithms to critiquing the tools we use to solve these problems. These tools are the synchronization primitives provided by today’s architectures, encompassing various kinds of locking, both spinning and blocking, and atomic operations such as compareAndSet() and its relatives. They have mostly served us well. We, the community of multiprocessor programmers, have been able to construct many useful and elegant data structures. Nevertheless, everyone knows that the tools are flawed. In this chapter, we review and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the standard synchronization primitives, and describe some emerging alternatives that are ...
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