On Saturday, 19 April 2014 at 05:08:06 UTC, froglegs wrote:
Also possible in C# with structs, interop annotations and
unsafe blocks.
And now you aren't using the language, but a (very) poor
subset of a language that doesn't even support templates.
Doesn't change the fact it is possible, but hey lets sell C++
agenda.
C++ exposes SSE/AVX intrinsics, C# does not.
That is not correct.
1 - Nowhere in the ANSI/ISO C++ are SSE/AVX intrinsics
defined, those are compiler extensions. So equal foot with the
C# EMCA standard;
Duh, but every C++ compiler exposes this, so it is defacto
standard. C++ has plenty of non-standard standards, such as
#pragma once.
3 - .NET Native and RyuJIT have official support for SIMD
instructions, GPGPU support is also planned
I see on MS website an article about having a vector data
type. While interesting that isn't the same as exposing the
actual instructions, which will limit potential gains.
The aricle
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/04/07/the-jit-finally-proposed-jit-and-simd-are-getting-married.aspx
Additionally .NET native will be MS only--
Except it already exists today with Mono. Microsoft is just
making the official .NET do something, Xamarin has been doing the
last years already, both in static native compilation and SIMD
support.
Any language can expose SIMD instructions, there is nothing
special about them in C++, because like every other language,
they are compiler extensions. Regardless of being a defacto
standard or not.
If I take the C# side on this, even though I also like C++, is
because we are in a D forum, and having a C# native toolchain
will certanly help young developers understand we don't need VMs
for memory safe systems programming languages.
Oberon compilers in the mid-90's were producing code that was as
good as C compilers back then. On those days I still wrote a
couple applications 100% in Assembly.
I think many value too much C and C++ compilers, because they
forget how long they have been around, and also never used
alternative system programming languages back when C and C++
compilers used to suck.
--
Paulo
