4 ms·
Per my last paragraph, I am not convinced about any of them. One of these days I really need to post my "ideas for languages" that I've got banging around on m
by jerf 3y ago
Per my last paragraph, I am not convinced about any of them.
One of these days I really need to post my "ideas for languages" that I've got banging around on my hard drive, but one of them is "a language that deals with the increasingly heterogeneous nature of the computer". You've got the CPU, the GPU, efficiency cores, whoknows what else in the future (NN cores), and it's only a small hop from there to consider other computers as resources too.
Full disclosure: I have no idea whatsoever what this looks like. Especially in light of the fact that you need to build not just for the exact machine you're developing on but for machines in the future as well. Some sort of model of what is being computed and some guestimate at the costs? (Something like an SQL query builder where you declare your goal and it does the computation about what resources to compute it with?) It's also possible that the huge gulfs in performance between all these parts are just too large to bridge and manual scheduling of all these resources is just the only choice.
Even just within a CPU it's rather annoyingly difficult to use vector-based code in modern languages. Perhaps something like an array-based language, but one that discards that field's bizarre love affair with single-character (if not outright Unicode) operators and can be read by a normal human, and just affords writing code in a style that SIMD becomes a sensible default rather than something the optimizer laboriously reverse engineers from your conventional imperative code. (Array based programming could really use a "for humans" version of those languages in general.)
To some extent, just sitting down for a year to learn modern assembler and starting from the very, very bottom once again to build a high level language, rather than starting with C and building "C, but ..." which is pretty much every modern language being developed, would be an interesting exercise if nothing else.
Another little example is I think Jai was supporting structures-of-arrays instead of arrays-of-structures, though I don't know if they kept it. I'd like to see a language where the language-level data structures are explicitly viewed through the lens of "how I serialize these into memory", rather than the data structure implicitly creating such a specification by how it is defined, so for instance you could swap out a SoA to an AoS by swapping only the way the compiler serializes to RAM and not any of the rest of the code. Obviously you provide defaults that look like modern languages, but with this you could directly implement things like tagged unions with custom bit layouts, or theoretically, directly accessing gzip'd data by specifying that this data structure can only be accessed sequentially but as long as that's what you do you don't need to directly unzip it, etc. This doesn't directly answer "how do you utilize modern hardware correctly" but gives you tools to potentially create a better match than what compilers give by default.
Again, to be clear, this is crazy pie-in-the-sky far out ideas that I do not have an implementation in mind for, but it's the sort of thing I'd like to see more experimentation with on the fringes of language dev. (And I only wish I had time to do it myself. Unfortunately, I simply do not.)
(And, as the sibling comments point out, yeah, assembler technically, but that's kind of a cop out.)
- hawk_ 3y ago> To some extent, just sitting down for a year to learn modern assembler and starting from the very, very bottom once again to build a high level language, rather than starting with C and building "C, but ..." Right so build a 'union' of what's available and somehow try to fit it in a unified model. I was hoping there was at least some theoretical PL answer of a unified model. But can't be because all manufacturers and industry sub-groups are doing their own thing. > assembler Yes that's definitely a cop out.
- schwoll 3y agoKeep in mind C is just basically assembly but encapsulated in a pretty package. If you create small executables and dump out the generated unoptimized assembly you'll be surprised just how simple it is. It pretty much just encapsulates the ideas of System V binary compatibility and then keeps going. So developing a language from scratch and skipping the use of C would really likely be just causing yourself more pain than you need as you're going to have to replicate all of the things C does anyways, so why not reuse what the experts have already done. And you get a lot of cross CPU and cross compiler portability. What you want is the idea of bootstrapping. Write your compiler in C, then as your language specification is developed enough, dogfood your own compiler. Write your compiler in your new language, then compile itself. This is called bootstrapping and is how many languages are developed. Once you are fully bootstrapped you can drop C altogether.
- fanf2 3y agoTAOS was a 1990s system for heterogeneous computing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Group https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Group but it predated the rise of GPGPUs and vector units so it didn’t tackle data parallelism and array processing.
- jerf 3y agoYeah, I don't want to pretend this is a totally new idea. There's not a lot of totally new ideas. But there was a lot of things tried in the 1960s and 1970s whose only fault was that they were simply too early. For example, people were researching neural nets back then. They basically got nowhere. In hindsight, they never could have, simply because it was too soon and the requisite power wasn't there yet. A phone is more heterogenous today than I think even supercomputers were in the 1990s, and the trend is only increasing diversity, with neural processors on the near horizon and quantum on the far horizon (as it seems quantum processors are far more likely to end up functioning as a sort of fancy "accelerator card" than their own CPUs). & honestly even CPUs are almost viewable as their C subset and their vector processing subset, and even "within" the same CPU the two don't always cross particularly gracefully.