[andikleen2]

Practically all valid fallback schemes require putting the lock (or something else like a sequence counter for a STM) into the read set of the transaction to properly synchronize between transactions and non transactions. Since you hide the transaction in your library it's not possible to do that with your current API. It would be very hard to construct a fallback path that is not racy.

(See Anti pattern #4 in the link above)

A global lock is usually the simplest fall back path, and the performance can be good enough because it's just a slow path. Of course it's always possible to do something more complex.

[scivey7]

Agreed that the basic "store to 8 locations" API would need tweaking to allow locking.

Re: adding a counter into the read set, I think the new generalized API here will support that out of the box: https://github.com/scivey/xact/blob/master/docs/api/generali...

Thoughts?

[andikleen2]

Yes with a read primitive it could be done in theory. It will be just quite awkward to use however as every caller has to do all that: define a lock, pass it always in, make sure the check for "lock is free" is correct etc.

Your unit tests don't seem to do it right.

It would probably be easier to hide the lock in your library, and enforce all other access to follow the right protocol using some ADTs. But then you just have a simple hardware TM accelerated STM.

FWIW the sweet spots for nice to use TM APIs are currently either lock elision, or compiler assisted TM (like __transaction* in gcc), or higher level libraries.

[scivey7]

Your feedback has been very helpful. Do you mind if I ask you for more advice down the line?