Software Transactional Memory (STM)
Understand how Clojure's STM provides atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable (ACID) transactions for shared state.
What is Software Transactional Memory?
Imagine a bank transfer: you don't want money to disappear or appear out of thin air. You want the whole operation to succeed or fail completely.
Software Transactional Memory (STM) in Clojure provides a similar guarantee for managing shared, mutable state in concurrent programs.
- It's like a mini-database transaction system for your application's memory.
- Ensures that operations on shared data are "all or nothing."
Why We Need STM
In concurrent programming, multiple parts of your code might try to change the same piece of data at the same time. This can lead to:
- Race conditions: The outcome depends on the unpredictable timing of operations.
- Inconsistent state: Data gets corrupted or partially updated.
STM helps prevent these issues by coordinating access to shared data, ensuring data integrity.
All lessons in this course
- Refs, Agents, Atoms for State
- Software Transactional Memory (STM)
- Promises, Futures & Async Operations
- core.async Channels and Go Blocks