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The 1987 paper about superoptimizers is well worth the read, BTW. It's quite short. Even the first example on its own (writing the sign function without any con
by petercooper 3y ago
The 1987 paper about superoptimizers is well worth the read, BTW. It's quite short. Even the first example on its own (writing the sign function without any conditionals) is a mind-bender but becomes straightforward once you see the trick used: https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse501/15sp/papers/massalin.pdf https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse501/15sp/papers...
- WalterBright 3y agoThe cool thing about that paper is compiler implementers immediately added those optimizations to their code generators.
- moonchild 3y agoBy 'those optimisations' I assume you mean the specific rewrites, not superoptimisation? There has been some interesting recent work in rewrite inference, e.g. ruler. (I recall one such project did a survey and found that many—possibly a majority—of the rewrites it had generated automatically were not present in the hand-written corpuses of gcc and clang. I'm not sure if there was subsequent work to supplement gcc and clang; this was a few years ago now; I think they were looking at gcc 7.)
- WalterBright 3y ago> I assume you mean the specific rewrites Of course. The superoptimizer is too slow to use in the compiler itself.
- petercooper 3y agoMaybe one day computers will be fast enough for a `gcc -O4` -O4 Extreme optimization. GCC uses AI and quantum computation to warp space-time and invent entirely new paradigms to make your programs 2% faster. Warning: May destroy your current universe.
- colinb 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10463312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10463312 talks about some in real time uses
- pfdietz 3y agoAlexia Massalin's thesis work on Synthesis was also cool.