transactional-memory

I've been doing some work on transactional memory and its viability for systems programming (databases, operating systems, servers, etc.). My own experience employing transactions, together with having seen how few communities use transactions in real code, has raised a question: What would convince you, a developer writing production code, to employ transactional memory in your work? Would it be general adoption? High speed? Improved reliability? By how much? For those that haven't seen them, memory transactions act like database transactions: operations proceed (apparently) in parallel, and

This is just a hypothetical scenario to illustrate my question. Suppose that there are two threads and one TVar shared between them. In one thread there is an atomically block that reads the TVar and takes 10s to complete. In another thread is an atomically block that modifies the TVar every second. Will the first atomically block ever complete? Surely it will just keep going back to the beginning, because the log is perpetually in an inconsistent state? As others have said: in theory there is no guarantee of progress. In practice there is also no guarantee of progress: import Control.Monad --