3 ms·

so much effort to match the performance of lower level languages that it would have actually been easier to use those directly :)

Tozen 5y ago
Good point. And you don't have to go that low. Maybe go use Object Pascal, Nim, or Vlang. I know... the libraries. But a lot of them are bindings of C libraries. So, you can create bindings in other languages too or use Python from those languages. There are various options.
Zababa 5y ago
I'm not sure, most people aren't writing ASM these days because the compilers are good enough for most cases. Compilers are great.
- zanellia 5y ago
  I think most HPC people would disagree with this statement. State-of-the-art HPC code is still written in ASM (see e.g., https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS) [that's what Intel is doing too]
  - guenthert 5y ago
    That ASM code is however not necessarily constructed manually. You'd think for high performance code with limited scope, a superoptimizer would be used.
    - zanellia 5y ago
      Not sure what a "superoptimizer" would look like in this context. For a reference, I know for sure that this https://github.com/giaf/blasfeo https://github.com/giaf/blasfeo (which beats Intel MKL) was coded entirely by hand.
      - giaf 5y ago
        There is more and more effort in the automatic development of high-performance linear algebra kernels. But based on my experience, it would certainly be a big challenge to have a tool able to exploit the subtle differences in the assembly languages of different architectures, if the aim is to match or even exceed an expert-crafted assembly kernel. Anyway, that's surely a very promising active research direction.
  - marmaduke 5y ago
    ASM makes sense when the time spent in a specific routine exceeds the time it takes to write the ASM, which makes a lot of sense for Blas, less so for other HPC yet speculative or less fundamental projects. Cvodes for instance doesn’t need to be written in ASM, and I think Julia makes a strong case that it could have been written in Julia.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    I don't think they would. I think they realize that state-of-the-art HPC code is a small fraction of all the code written. I doubt that these people write ASM instead of Python or JS or C or whatever when doing simple scripts.
zanellia 5y ago
I would disagree on "easier" :) Ever spent half a day debugging a segfault?

Tozen 5y ago

Good point. And you don't have to go that low. Maybe go use Object Pascal, Nim, or Vlang. I know... the libraries. But a lot of them are bindings of C libraries. So, you can create bindings in other languages too or use Python from those languages. There are various options.

Zababa 5y ago

I'm not sure, most people aren't writing ASM these days because the compilers are good enough for most cases. Compilers are great.

zanellia 5y ago
I think most HPC people would disagree with this statement. State-of-the-art HPC code is still written in ASM (see e.g., https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS https://github.com/xianyi/OpenBLAS) [that's what Intel is doing too]
- guenthert 5y ago
  That ASM code is however not necessarily constructed manually. You'd think for high performance code with limited scope, a superoptimizer would be used.
  - zanellia 5y ago
    Not sure what a "superoptimizer" would look like in this context. For a reference, I know for sure that this https://github.com/giaf/blasfeo https://github.com/giaf/blasfeo (which beats Intel MKL) was coded entirely by hand.
    - giaf 5y ago
      There is more and more effort in the automatic development of high-performance linear algebra kernels. But based on my experience, it would certainly be a big challenge to have a tool able to exploit the subtle differences in the assembly languages of different architectures, if the aim is to match or even exceed an expert-crafted assembly kernel. Anyway, that's surely a very promising active research direction.
- marmaduke 5y ago
  ASM makes sense when the time spent in a specific routine exceeds the time it takes to write the ASM, which makes a lot of sense for Blas, less so for other HPC yet speculative or less fundamental projects. Cvodes for instance doesn’t need to be written in ASM, and I think Julia makes a strong case that it could have been written in Julia.
- Zababa 5y ago
  I don't think they would. I think they realize that state-of-the-art HPC code is a small fraction of all the code written. I doubt that these people write ASM instead of Python or JS or C or whatever when doing simple scripts.

zanellia 5y ago

I would disagree on "easier" :) Ever spent half a day debugging a segfault?