Small Vectors Proposal

[Bill Baxter]

Andrei Alexandrescu (See Website For Email) wrote:
> Having read the proposal, I think it can likely be accommodated entirely 
> with current and up-and-coming language features. To expand:

>> Moreover, many architectures are specially optimized for the lower 
>> dimensional cases, and offer special registers which are virtually 
>> impossible to properly exploit using libraries alone.  The situation 
>> is analogous to floating point arithmetic, proper hardware support 
>> requires language level integration.
> 
> I don't see much of an analogy, but this is also a minor point. Floating 
> point arithmetic was weird way before it was implemented in hardware, 
> and the weirdness reflected in languages. But on many machines adding 
> two floating point numbers required a routine call, which didn't add or 
> subtract anything to the equation.

Your responses to the other points seem reasonable and encouraging, but 
your response to this issue concerning performance is... what?  That 
making optimal use of the hardware is not important?

For more specifics of what Mikola finds problematic on the efficiency 
front see:
http://www.digitalmars.com/webnews/newsgroups.php?art_group=digitalmars.D&article_id=47596 


--bb