Since (SIMD) vectors are so common and every reasonabe system support
them in one way or the other (and scalar emulation of this is rather
simple), why not have support for this in D directly?
Yes, the array operations are nice (and one of the main reasons for why
I like D :) ), but have the problem that an array of floats must be
aligned on float boundaries and not vector boundaries. In my mind
vectors are a primitive data type that should be exposed by the
programming language.
Something OpenCL-like:
float4 vec;
vec.xyzw = {1.0,1.0, 1.0, 1.0}; // assignment
vec.xyzw = vec.wyxz; // permutation
vec[i] = 1.0; // indexing
And then we can easily immagine some extra nice features to have with
respect to operators:
vec ^ vec2; // 3d cross product for float vectors, for int vectors xor
Has this been discussed before?
/ Mattias
