One embodiment of the present invention provides a system that facilitates precise exception semantics for a virtual machine. During operation, the system executes a program in the virtual machine using a processor that includes a gated store buffer that stores values to be written to a memory. This gated store buffer is configured to delay a store to the memory until after a speculatively-optimized region of the program commits. The processor signals an exception when it detects that a load following the store is attempting to access the same memory region being written by the store prior to the commitment of the speculatively-optimized region.