primitive vector types

[bearophile]

Don:
> I don't think that's messy at all. I can't see much difference between 
> special support for float[4] versus float4. It's better if the code can 
> take advantage of hardware without specific support. Bear in mind that 
> SSE/SSE2 is a temporary situation. AVX provides for much longer arrays 
> of vectors; and it's extensible. You'd end up needing to keep adding on 
> special types whenever a new CPU comes out.
> 
> Note that the fundamental concept which is missing from the C virtual 
> machine is that all modern machines can efficiently perform operations 
> on arrays of built-in types of length 2^n, for some small value of n.
> We need to get this into the language abstraction. Not follow C++ in 
> hacking a few extra special types onto the old, deficient C model. And I 
> think D is actually in a position to do this.
> 
> float[4] would be a greatly superior option if it could be done.
> The key requirements are:
> (1) need to specify that static arrays are passed by value.
> (2) need to keep stack aligned to 16.
> The good news is that both of these appear to be done on DMD2-Mac!

I have quoted it all because I like the experience and ideas you bring to D.
But how can the operations like shuffling, or how to map a sqrt on just the first item of such 4 floats, or on them all, etc? What syntax can be used?

Regarding the array operations already implemented, are there ways to force the compiler to inline such code/operations?

Bye,
bearophile