x86 intrinsics for sale cheap

[Cecil Ward]

On Wednesday, 31 May 2023 at 15:56:45 UTC, Cecil Ward wrote:
> I have been working on simple wrappers around new(ish) x86 
> instructions that are not otherwise accessible. Also with 
> replacement functions in straight D for machines where the 
> instruction is not available. Currently only for GDC as LDC 
> doesn’t support some of the features of GCC inline asm that I 
> am relying on  - named parameters in the asm with %[name] 
> syntax. But hopefully that will get fixed by the LDC 
> maintainers, so I will be able to work with either compiler. My 
> routines need more testing and a vast amount of cleanup. So 
> it’s early days.
>
> Is that something that you would be interested in for the D 
> runtime library? (For GDC / LDC ?) I unfortunately haven’t 
> attacked DMD yet because that uses a different inline asm 
> syntax, and would mean a rewrite. But that isn’t a problem 
> because thr DMD user gets the pure D replacement anyway due to 
> conditional compilation.
>
> If you are interested, then let me know. I do need help testing 
> though and some advice about unit tests.

The instructions are those that were new with the Haswell micro 
architecture so that’s what ten years ago now, so now is the time 
that these instructions will become more usable for programmers 
worried about older machines, and there are the fallbacks too, as 
far as I have got with that.