A monad supporting atomic memory transactions.

Perform a series of STM actions atomically.

Using atomically inside an unsafePerformIO or unsafeInterleaveIO subverts some of guarantees that STM provides. It makes it possible to run a transaction inside of another transaction, depending on when the thunk is evaluated. If a nested transaction is attempted, an exception is thrown by the runtime. It is possible to safely use atomically inside unsafePerformIO or unsafeInterleaveIO, but the typechecker does not rule out programs that may attempt nested transactions, meaning that the programmer must take special care to prevent these.

However, there are functions for creating transactional variables that can always be safely called in unsafePerformIO. See: newTVarIO, newTChanIO, newBroadcastTChanIO, newTQueueIO, newTBQueueIO, and newTMVarIO.

Using unsafePerformIO inside of atomically is also dangerous but for different reasons. See unsafeIOToSTM for more on this.

always is a variant of alwaysSucceeds in which the invariant is expressed as an STM Bool action that must return True. Returning False or raising an exception are both treated as invariant failures.

alwaysSucceeds adds a new invariant that must be true when passed to alwaysSucceeds, at the end of the current transaction, and at the end of every subsequent transaction. If it fails at any of those points then the transaction violating it is aborted and the exception raised by the invariant is propagated.

Retry execution of the current memory transaction because it has seen values in TVars which mean that it should not continue (e.g. the TVars represent a shared buffer that is now empty). The implementation may block the thread until one of the TVars that it has read from has been updated. (GHC only)

Compose two alternative STM actions (GHC only).

If the first action completes without retrying then it forms the result of the orElse. Otherwise, if the first action retries, then the second action is tried in its place. If both actions retry then the orElse as a whole retries.

A variant of throw that can only be used within the STM monad.

Throwing an exception in STM aborts the transaction and propagates the exception.

Although throwSTM has a type that is an instance of the type of throw, the two functions are subtly different:

throw e    `seq` x  ===> throw e
throwSTM e `seq` x  ===> x

The first example will cause the exception e to be raised, whereas the second one won't. In fact, throwSTM will only cause an exception to be raised when it is used within the STM monad. The throwSTM variant should be used in preference to throw to raise an exception within the STM monad because it guarantees ordering with respect to other STM operations, whereas throw does not.

Exception handling within STM actions.