The mempool maintains a list of potentially valid transactions, both to broadcast to other nodes, as well as to provide to the consensus reactor when it is selected as the block proposer.
There are two sides to the mempool state:
External functionality is exposed via network interfaces to potentially untrusted actors.
Internal functionality is exposed via method calls to other code compiled into the tendermint binary.
What does it provide the consensus reactor? What guarantees does it need from the ABCI app? (talk about interleaving processes in concurrency)
The implementation within this library also implements a tx cache. This is so that signatures don't have to be reverified if the tx has already been seen before. However, we only store valid txs in the cache, not invalid ones. This is because invalid txs could become good later. Txs that are included in a block aren't removed from the cache, as they still may be getting received over the p2p network. These txs are stored in the cache by their hash, to mitigate memory concerns.