Denis Koroskin wrote:
On Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:25:04 +0300, Mattias Holm
<[email protected]> wrote:
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
I don't see any reason why float4 can't be made a library type.
Walter at one point suggested that float[4] should be specially
recognized by the compiler -- it would always be aligned, and stored in
a SSE register if possible. Ditto for float[3].
