The Theory of Transactional Memory

Transactional memory (TM) is a promising paradigm for concurrent programming. This paper is an overview of our recent work on defining a theory of TM. We first present a correctness condition of a TM, ensured by most existing TM implementations. Then, we describe two progress properties that characterize the two main classes of TM implementations: obstruction-free and lock-based TMs. We use these properties to establish several results on the inherent power and limitations of TMs.