D 2 target architectures

[new2d]

Trass3r Wrote:

> > I heard about D recently from a thread in the Gentoo Forums. My question
> > is, if I'm mostly interested in shared memory high performance
> > computing, do the radical new D 2 concurrency features help me at all?
> > What I have in mind is doing automatic map/reduce style of programming.
> 
> Sounds like http://cis.jhu.edu/~dsimcha/d/phobos/std_parallelism.html will  
> be your friend.
> It's currently in the review stage, see thread "David Simcha's  
> std.parallelism".

Thanks! The documentation didn't help much in solving the low level details. It isn't clear to me how it uses SSE or AVX. But.. gotta give it a go.

> > I'm going to buy a new hardware providing the AVX instruction set,  
> > possibly a two socket system. This should improve loop vectorization a  
> > lot. How should it all work is via the "native" foreach and Phobos 2  
> > library features. Is this possible? Does Phobos 2 also use the three  
> > level cache architecture in Sandy Bridge efficiently? I was considering  
> > D because I don't want to mess with low level assembly and use a high  
> > level modern language instead. C++ is also getting there, in GCC 4.6 the  
> > loop vectorization is already good.
> 
> Well array (or "vector") operations are currently optimized to leverage  
> SSE - but this is no compiler optimization, it's hand-tuned code.
> Apart from that there's GDC (using the gcc backend) and LDC (using LLVM as  
> the backend) which potentially optimize a lot.

Why doesn't the "official" D compiler generate fast code? Is the main priority reliability or standards conformance? But.. I'll test how well GDC works with GCC 4.5 and 4.6.