A Semantic Framework for Designer Transactions

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.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ESOP
• Authors: Jan Vitek, Suresh Jagannathan, Adam Welc, Antony L. Hosking
• Keywords: ESOP 2004, Lower-level Data Structures, Programming Languages, So-called Acid Properties, Strong Serialization Guarantees