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By the way, if you’re going to add SIMD intrinsics into the Rust standard, I think you better contact Intel and ask them whether they OK that. Or seek legal ad
by Const-me 8y ago
By the way, if you’re going to add SIMD intrinsics into the Rust standard, I think you better contact Intel and ask them whether they OK that.
Or seek legal advice.
According to google patents, Intel has 4537 patents related to SIMD. The reason why GCC is OK with their intrinsics, in 2002 they were put there by Intel employees. Intel obviously wants people to use them because this helps Intel sell their CPUs. But having them standardized can potentially decrease Intel’s profits by undermining these patents and enabling hardware and software emulators.
- steveklabnik 8y agoThanks! I am not a lawyer, nor was I directly involved in this, but I'll pass it up the tree.
- Const-me 8y agoI’m not a lawyer either, I’m a software developer; but I’ve been doing this long enough to develop certain degree of paranoia regarding patents and IP rights legal BS.
- steveklabnik 8y agoI hear you! Basically same here. I had not come across this one...
- burntsushi 8y agoI haven't either. FWIW, myself and one of your cohorts at Mozilla had a phone call with Intel (a while ago at this point), and while there were no lawyers on the line, the engineers we talked to sounded very happy about what we were doing.
- steveklabnik 8y agoThat’s good to hear.