Editing Software transactional memory (section)

{{Short description|Concurrency control mechanism in software}}
In [[computer science]], '''software transactional memory''' ('''STM''') is a [[concurrency control]] mechanism analogous to [[database transaction]]s for controlling access to [[Shared memory (interprocess communication)|shared memory]] in [[concurrent computing]]. It is an alternative to [[Lock (computer science)|lock-based synchronization]]. STM is a strategy implemented in software, rather than as a hardware component. A transaction in this context occurs when a piece of code executes a series of reads and writes to shared memory. These reads and writes logically occur at a single instant in time; intermediate states are not visible to other (successful) transactions. The idea of providing hardware support for transactions originated in a 1986 paper by [[Tom Knight (scientist)|Tom Knight]].<ref name=":0">Tom Knight. ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20131101085557/http://web.mit.edu/mmt/Public/Knight86.pdf An architecture for mostly functional languages.]'' Proceedings of the 1986 ACM conference on [[Lisp (programming language)|Lisp]] and functional programming.</ref> The idea was popularized by [[Maurice Herlihy]] and [[J. Eliot B. Moss]].<ref name=Herlihy1993>Maurice Herlihy and J. Eliot B. Moss. ''Transactional memory: architectural support for lock-free data structures.'' Proceedings of the 20th annual international symposium on Computer architecture (ISCA '93). Volume 21, Issue 2, May 1993.</ref> In 1995, [[Nir Shavit]] and Dan Touitou extended this idea to software-only transactional memory (STM).<ref>Nir Shavit and Dan Touitou. ''Software transactional memory.'' Distributed Computing. Volume 10, Number 2. February 1997.</ref> Since 2005, STM has been the focus of intense research<ref>{{cite web|title="software transactional memory" - Google Scholar|url=https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2005&q=%22software+transactional+memory%22|access-date=10 November 2013}}</ref> and support for practical implementations is growing.