suggestion: basic SIMD types modelled after Cg/HLSL

[Andrei Khropov]

cschueler wrote:

> you'd obviate the need for a large number of people (basically
> the non-scientific crowd) to write their own matrix/vector classes and give
> them a familiar syntax to boot.

As D is quite popular among game developers why not include these classes into
the standard library?

There's a project 
http://www.dsource.org/projects/helix

that contains this functionality.
With some templates/conditional compilation trickery it can be extended to
optionally use SIMD instructions.

> 
> I'd envision that a sufficiently endowed compiler could generate code for the
> laguage features even if the target platform has no SIMD hardware; much in the
> same spirit of a float-emulator when native hardware is not available.
> 
> Anyway, these are only points to kick off a discussion. Obvioulsy I'd like D
> to move into a direction where it is useful for me (As you may infer from my
> other posts :) )

Well, I believe matrices and vectors and simple operations on them should be
built-in into the language anyway (well, at the present moment it's a beyond
1.0 feature).

IMHO using SIMD for these operations is a matter of compiler optimization.

I'm not a compiler writer however so I can't judge how tough it is to implement.

-- 
AKhropov