Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Software based Transactional Memory

This is interesting news for C# developer. MSDN DevLabs offers the STM.NET as an extension to the .NET framework 4.0 (Beta 1) for experimental purposes. STM stands for Software Transactional Memory and provides support for concurrency in order to use the multi-core architecture efficiently. STM does not provide a lock framework. It comes with an approach to isolate shared state which is the real issue when it comes to concurrency (because of dead locks and/or race conditions). Based on the ‘transaction pattern’ used in other areas of computer science, code (and memory) is handled isolated to enable an atomic execution. Code sections are demarcated accordingly. It will be interesting to check on this, especially pertaining to performance implications. But anyhow, it might be a promising step, at least for the C# folks.

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