Why the grass may not be greener on the other side
Paul E. McKenney, Maged M. Michael, Josh Triplett, Jonathan Walpole · ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review · 2010
The advent of multi-core and multi-threaded processor architectures highlights the need to address the well-known shortcomings of the ubiquitous lock-based synchronization mechanisms. To this end, transactional memory has been viewed by many as a promising alternative to locking. This paper therefore presents a constructive critique of locking and transactional memory: their strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement.