[OT] Keeping algorithm and optimisations separated

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Sun, 09 Sep 2012 19:36:56 +0200
"renoX" <renozyx at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> one common issue when you optimize code is that the code becomes 
> difficult to read/maintain, but if you're trying to process 
> images there may be hope: Halide is a DSL (currently embedded in 
> C++) which keep the algorithm and the "optimization 
> recipe"(schedule) separated AND the performance can be similar to 
> hand-optimized C++ code.
> 
> You can read more about Halide here: http://halide-lang.org/
> 
> Regards,
> renoX
> 
> PS: I'm not related at all with the Halide's developers but I 
> thought this is an interesting topic.
> 
> 

That is very interesting. Sounds very domain-specific though, I wonder
how, or if, it could be generalized? Then again, on second thought,
certain parts of the "schedule" part do seem pretty general.

D would be a perfect language for this. It'd be cool to port it and
demonstrate that an embedded language wouldn't be needed in D. It
doesn't sound *too* far off from D ranges and std.parallelize.

I think I'm gonna have to find a printer and kill a tree
to actually read through that whitepaper, though. I don't understand why
academic folk people still insist on putting electronic documents in
paged *multi-column* form. PDF or not, it makes no sense, and only
makes it awkward (at best) to read. This isn't 1970.