Hello, most modern processors have an instruction set that allows them to perform the same instruction on multiple data in parallel like MMX, SSE, SSE2 or 3DNOW on the x86 platform. I have never heard of a high level language where you can make use of these. It would be a nice feature for D if it had instructions or operators to use this kind of instructions in a generic, portable way, without having to use complicated and platform dependant ASM code. Even if the destination architecture don't support those operations, the compiler could simply do the same instructions sequentially in a loop, making the code portable, but faster when compiled for an architecture that support SIMD.

Dominic wrote:

> Hello, most modern processors have an instruction set that allows them to
> perform the same instruction on multiple data in parallel like MMX, SSE, SSE2 or
> 3DNOW on the x86 platform. I have never heard of a high level language where you
> can make use of these. [...]

I'm using them from C/C++ on Mac OS X, if that counts ?

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/
universal_binary/universal_binary_matrix_a/chapter_8_section_2.html

It has intrinsics for AltiVec (PPC) and for SSE2 (X86),
as both come with a C programming interface - AFAIK...


GCC 4.x should do auto-vectorization, but I haven't stressed
the GDC implentation to see what it means for actual D code...

Hmm, *looks* like "-ftree-vectorizer-verbose=6" is a neat flag ?
http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/tree-ssa/vectorization.html#status4.0

--anders