Isolates: Serializability Enforcement for Concurrent ML

There has been much recent interest in exploring higher-level concurrency control abstractions such as Software Transactional Memory (STM) to alleviate the complexity of reasoning about interactions among concurrent threads of control. Isolation and atomicity are the two critical properties provided by an STM that guarantee serializability of concurrent actions. Isolation ensures that transactions execute without interference from effects performed by other transactions, and atomicity guarantees that intermediate effects performed by a transaction are not seen by other concurrently executing transactions.