6.15.2. Software Transactional Memory

GHC now supports a new way to coordinate the activities of Concurrent Haskell threads, called Software Transactional Memory (STM). The STM papers are an excellent introduction to what STM is, and how to use it.

The main library you need to use is the stm library. The main features supported are these:

• Atomic blocks.
• Transactional variables.
• Operations for composing transactions: retry, and orElse.
• Data invariants.

All these features are described in the papers mentioned earlier.