Extending a C-like language for portable SIMD programming

Abstract

SIMD instructions are common in CPUs for years now. Using these instructions effectively requires not only vectorization of code, but also modifications to the data layout. However, automatic vectorization techniques are often not powerful enough and suffer from restricted scope of applicability; hence, programmers often vectorize their programs manually by using intrinsics: compiler-known functions that directly expand to machine instructions. They significantly decrease programmer productivity by enforcing a very error-prone and hard-to-read assembly-like programming style. Furthermore, intrinsics are not portable because they are tied to a specific instruction set.