[senderista]

I mostly agree with this (having worked on a simple STM for C++), but with a couple caveats:

- Clojure doesn't enforce purity (it can't), but from what I hear its STM seems to work pretty well (aside from some perf issues possibly? haven't used it). That's because "mostly pure" functional programming is encouraged by both the language itself and the culture and ecosystem around it, so uncontrolled side effects are less likely to be a problem.

- I think STM can work "well enough" in unmanaged languages as long as you don't try to boil the ocean and make it perfectly transparent, safe, and fast under all circumstances (Microsoft, IBM, Intel and several others tried for years and failed). That means there will inevitably be huge footguns for non-expert programmers (e.g., any side effect might be invoked every time a transaction is optimistically and transparently retried). These footguns can be mitigated by affordances like commit/abort handlers and infallible transactions.