Very simple SIMD programming

[Manu]

On 25 October 2012 14:13, bearophile <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com> wrote:

> Manu:
>
>
>  I think this is far more convenient than any crazy 'if' syntax :) .. It's
>> also perfectly optimal on all architectures I know aswell!
>>
>
> You should show more respect for them and their work. Their ideas seem
> very far from being crazy. They have also proved their type system to be
> sound. This kind of work is lightyears ahead of the usual sloppy designs
> you see in D features, where design holes are found only years later, when
> sometimes it's too much late to fix them :-)


I think I said numerous times in my former email that it's really cool, and
certainly very interesting.
I just can't imagine it appearing in D any time soon. We do have some ways
to conveniently do lots of that stuff right now, and make some improvement
on other competing languages in the area.
I'd like to see more realistic case studies of their approach where it
significantly simplifies particular workloads?


That if syntax (that is integrated in a type system that manages the masks,
> plus implicit polymorphism that allows the same function to be used both in
> a vectorized or scalar context) works with larger amounts of code too,
> while you are just doing a differential assignment.
>

And that's likely where it all starts getting very complicated. If the
branches start doing significant (and unbalanced) work, an un-skilled
programmer will have a lot of trouble understanding what sort of mess they
may be making.
And as usual, x86 will be the most tolerant, so they may not even know when
profiling.
I've said before, it's very interesting, but it also sound potentially very
dangerous. It's probably also an awful lot of work I'd wager... I doubt
we'll see those expressions any time soon.
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