1. A method for avoiding locks by speculatively executing critical sections of code, comprising: allowing a process to speculatively execute a critical section of code within a program without first acquiring a lock associated with the critical section; wherein if the process completes the critical section without encountering an interfering data access from another process, the method further comprises, committing changes made during the speculative execution, and resuming normal non-speculative execution of the program past the critical section; and wherein if an interfering data access from another process is encountered during execution of the critical section, the method further comprises, discarding changes made during the speculative execution, and attempting to re-execute the critical section zero or more times.