Is it really better to introduce VML as a temporary hack than it is to fix LLVM, even if the latter takes a little longer?
In Matlab, until quite recently X.^2 was slower than X.*X. It was that way for something like 25 years before they fixed it. --Tim On Monday, September 08, 2014 10:50:53 PM Jeff Waller wrote: > I feel that x^2 must among the things that are convenient and fast; it's > one of those language elements that people simply depend on. If it's > inconvenient, then people are going to experience that over and over. If > it's not fast enough people are going experience slowness over and over. > > Like Simon says it's already a thing > <https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/2741>. Maybe use of something > like VML is an option or necessary, or maybe extending inference.jl or > maybe even it eventually might not be necessary > <http://llvm.org/docs/Vectorizers.html>. > > Julia is a fundamental improvement, but give Matlab and Octave their due, > that syntax is great. When I say essentially C, to me it means > > Option A use built in infix: > > X.^y > > versus Option B go write a function > > pow(x,y) > for i = 1 ... > for j = .... > ... > etc > > Option A is just too good, it has to be supported. > > What to do? Is this a fundamental flaw? No I don't think so. Is this a > one time only thing? It feels like no, this is one of many things that > will occasionally occur. Is it possible to make this a hassle? Like I > think Tony is saying, can/should there be a "branch of immediate > optimizations?" Stuff that would eventually be done in a better way but > needs to be completed now. It's a branch so things can be collected and > retracted more coherently.
