A Semantic Framework for Designer Transactions

Abstract

Abstract.A transaction defines a locus of computation that satisfies important concurrency and failure properties; these so-called ACID properties provide strong serialization guarantees that allow us to reason about concurrent and distributed programs in terms of higher-level units of computation (e.g., transactions) rather than lower-level data structures (e.g., mutual-exclusion locks). This paper presents a framework for specifying the semantics of a transactional facility integrated within a host programming language. The TFJ calculus supports nested and multi-threaded transactions. We give a semantics to TFJ that is parameterized by the definition of the transactional mechanism that permits the study of different transaction models.

Transactional Memory: Glimmer of a Theory

“…However, opacity does not specify the semantics of the interactions between the various programming language constructs that are inside and outside atomic blocks. Some work on those issues is presented, e.g., in [42][43][44][45][46].…”

SingleTrack: A Dynamic Determinism Checker for Multithreaded Programs

“…[21,11,12,22]) offer an interesting alternative to explicit concurrency control, and we believe that a combination or synthesis of these two approaches may yield an attractive programming model. In particular, language runtimes could implement determinism via techniques similar to those used to implement transactions, combined with a deterministic scheduler for threads inside transactions.…”

A Class-Based Object Calculus of Dynamic Binding: Reduction and Properties

“…Vitek et al [VJWH04] have recently proposed a calculi-based model of standard database transactions. They have formalized the optimistic and two-phase locking concurrency control strategies.…”