[bitc-dev] Bitc and Simd

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 11:08 AM, orthochronous <orthochronous at gmail.com>wrote:

> As I said at the outset, I don't expect anything to be done about
> actually implementing [SIMD] now, but it'd be reassuring to check
> that the foundations being laid aren't precluding this being
> implemented efficiently in the future.
>
>
You and Ben are hereby elected.

My problem with SIMD, right now, is in three parts:

   - I don't know enough about it to deal with it.
   - I'm already at my overflow threshold; I don't have the conceptual
   capacity to take this on right now.
   - As you pointed out, there isn't any general consensus about how SIMD
   compute models work across the candidate processors.

Given this, I think your basic model - that we should handle them for now
with intrinsics - is correct.

I'm also fairly confident that we are in no *worse* a position than anybody
else. Ben's points about alignment and offset specification are well taken;
alignment iswhat the (undocumented) declarations part of the structure
definition mechanism is for, and I know about the need to deal with offsets.
Other than that, what do we *know* we are missing?

shap
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.coyotos.org/pipermail/bitc-dev/attachments/20100813/68193230/attachment.html