3 ms·

Being more ergonomic than C++ is a low bar anyways, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. For starters, field offset syntax is painful (see Gankra's po

Being more ergonomic than C++ is a low bar anyways, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. For starters, field offset syntax is painful (see Gankra's post on this topic) and pointer manipulation lacks syntactic sugar. I also believe unsigned integer promotion and UFCS would improve ergonomics with high-perf code (although I'm aware this is not going to be included in Rust).

lifthrasiir 3y ago
At that point it is better to have some kind of DSL that should not be in the main language, because it would target a much lower level than a typical program. The best effort I've seen in this scene was Google's Highway [1] (not to be confused with HighwayHash) and I even once attempted to recreate it in Rust, but it is still a bit far from my ideal. [1] https://github.com/google/highway https://github.com/google/highway
- janwas 3y ago
  Thanks :) We're always curious to hear how it could be improved?
  - lifthrasiir 3y ago
    I think Highway is already good enough as a non-DSL. I had something like GLSL in mind, but more blended to the parent language.
- superjan 3y ago
  I agree about having a DSL. It may not need to be low level, you could have an array language like APL/J. But glsl would work for me too, the important thing is to lure developers to expose parallelism.
  - dzaima 3y ago
    The kind of things you can use direct SIMD for is a reasonably-different space than array languages; while some things can translate reasonably, APL-likes get much less pretty on operations where elements don't have homogeneous meaning/mapping, e.g.: the base64 conversion of OP. (for reference, I work on https://github.com/dzaima/CBQN https://github.com/dzaima/CBQN, an implementation of BQN, an APL derivative, and we have a DSL for implementing SIMD primitives for it (and sometimes scalar ones too): https://github.com/mlochbaum/Singeli https://github.com/mlochbaum/Singeli)

lifthrasiir 3y ago

At that point it is better to have some kind of DSL that should not be in the main language, because it would target a much lower level than a typical program. The best effort I've seen in this scene was Google's Highway [1] (not to be confused with HighwayHash) and I even once attempted to recreate it in Rust, but it is still a bit far from my ideal. [1] https://github.com/google/highway https://github.com/google/highway

janwas 3y ago
Thanks :) We're always curious to hear how it could be improved?
- lifthrasiir 3y ago
  I think Highway is already good enough as a non-DSL. I had something like GLSL in mind, but more blended to the parent language.
superjan 3y ago
I agree about having a DSL. It may not need to be low level, you could have an array language like APL/J. But glsl would work for me too, the important thing is to lure developers to expose parallelism.
- dzaima 3y ago
  The kind of things you can use direct SIMD for is a reasonably-different space than array languages; while some things can translate reasonably, APL-likes get much less pretty on operations where elements don't have homogeneous meaning/mapping, e.g.: the base64 conversion of OP. (for reference, I work on https://github.com/dzaima/CBQN https://github.com/dzaima/CBQN, an implementation of BQN, an APL derivative, and we have a DSL for implementing SIMD primitives for it (and sometimes scalar ones too): https://github.com/mlochbaum/Singeli https://github.com/mlochbaum/Singeli)