Re: Ada and vectorization

[Matthias Kretschmer <schreib_mir_du_spacken@gmx.de>]

Robert A Duff wrote:

> Various early versions of the Ada 9X proposals had some explicit support
> for vectorizing and the like.  I don't remember the details.  You could
> look up the early versions if you're interested.
> 
> These were removed, not because there was anything wrong with them
> technically in and of themselves, but because there was a general
> feeling amongst reviewers (especially compiler writers) that there were
> too many new features.
> 
> - Bob

Oh didn't wanted to say, this is wrong, but I think there is a better 
solution - I do not want to care about, where to use or not use this or 
that feature of an architecture or of architectures, maybe they are 
changing, what to do next, write some new pragmas, to let the compiler 
optimize for the new architectures better? I think that today compilers - 
optimizers of compilers - are capable of finding places where to use vector 
units or what how ever so cool feature of you cpu, so I want them to decide 
and let me alone with the real important stuff. I do not want to know how 
many clock cycles A takes in unit B of cpu C. Think of what you have to 
know just to get something done, which other compilers do for their own 
without bothering the programmer.

The logic to decide when to use or not to use vectorization of instructions 
is out there, just someone should implement this in an Ada compiler. No 
need to change the language itself. So I do not know how good gcc3.1 is in 
vectorization of instructions, but there are some good examples how to do 
this right (so I don't know of Ada compiler :( ): Sun's C Compiler, Intel's 
C Compiler, both if someone wants them to use, do a lot of vectorization 
with clean written code.

-- 
Greetings
Matthias Kretschmer