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To be fair, SIMD in JS was kicked off by John Mccutchan who was on Dart and soon after joined Dart VM team. While there was appetite for SIMD in JS (Brendan, in
by paulirish 12y ago
To be fair, SIMD in JS was kicked off by John Mccutchan who was on Dart and soon after joined Dart VM team. While there was appetite for SIMD in JS (Brendan, in particular, was a big proponent of John's proposal), I think it wouldn't have happened when it did without Dart and his work.
- BrendanEich 12y agoConfirming what Paul writes here. John tweeted, I tweeted back, here: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/308343704194781186 https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/308343704194781186 SIMD is in all the SoCs of course, which means it has been on JS stewards' radar for a while now (remember River Trail? see my blog post, which had early Dart humor and Dash-memo reaction: https://brendaneich.com/2011/09/capitoljs-rivertrail/ https://brendaneich.com/2011/09/capitoljs-rivertrail/). I worked at MicroUnity from 1992-5 on many high-risk things including a new CPU that was designed to do extensive SIMD and bit-moving instructions; using these in an instruction-level simulator, I implemented 64-QAM demod and Reed-Solomon error correction for the cable-net of the day (TCL, remember them?). Alas the CPU design was unrealizable in hardware. SIMD has been around quite a while in hardware, so as KGadd says intrinsics for it have shown up in major languages. It was only a matter of time and the right person for JS, and John McCutchan did the job. Thanks, John! Google funded John's work for Dart and didn't keep him from doing JS uplift, so thanks to Google too.