D 2 target architectures

[Trass3r]

> 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".


> 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.