Hi all,
Its been more than year since NEP 54 was drafted (see
https://numpy.org/neps/nep-0054-simd-cpp-highway.html). A PR has been opened to
change the status of NEP 54 to "Accepted"
(https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/28556). A few details to iron out:
1. Static/dynamic dispatch: Highway is currently used only for static
dispatch (leveraging highway intrisincs) and we still use NumPy/meson
infrastructure to do the dynamic dispatching in NumPy. Given it has worked well
for us so far without any issues, I don't see a big motivation to switch to
Highway's dynamic dispatch. Please voice your opinion if you think otherwise.
2. MSVC support: Given that highway support on MSVC is limited and prone to
bugs, we are not sure if NumPy wants to support building from source with MSVC.
Several options were discussed on the community meeting which are summarized
below:
* Drop MSVC support entirely and switch to clang-cl on Windows.
* Support building with MSVC but disable SIMD kernels written using
Highway.
* Continue supporting MSVC for SIMD kernels with static dispatch with
the caveat that it could be buggy.
Most people agreed with option (b) and encourage people who build NumPy with
MSVC to switch to clang-cl, if they care about performance.
Since incorporating Highway into NumPy, the community has successfully ported
existing C SIMD kernels to highway [1], [2], [3] and a few more are work in
progress [4], [5], [6].
Raghuveer
[1] https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/28368
[2] https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/25934
[3] https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/25781
[4] https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/28490
[5] https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/27402
[6] https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/26346
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