Stream: cranelift

Topic: non power-of-two vector sizes


view this post on Zulip bjorn3 (Feb 08 2021 at 20:37):

stdsimd wants to support non power-of-two vector sizes, but Cranelift doesn't have support for this. Could this be added or is this too complex. For reference see https://github.com/bjorn3/rustc_codegen_cranelift/issues/1136 and the pingbacks there.

The silicon that supports these more or less directly: GPUs handle Vec3s (f32x3 typically) all the time already. Arm SVE supports 384-bit width vector registers and is available Soon™. RISCVV will ...

view this post on Zulip Chris Fallin (Feb 09 2021 at 02:19):

Hmm -- this would be a nontrivial amount of work, and my first instinct is that it should be low-priority as it is still (it seems to me) a niche use-case not supported on most hardware we would run on today

view this post on Zulip Chris Fallin (Feb 09 2021 at 02:19):

that said we can look at generalizing the vector types eventually (i.e. integer-parameterized types, rather than a fixed finite set of 32x4, 64x2, ...) if this need becomes more important

view this post on Zulip Jubilee (Feb 22 2021 at 17:07):

This became pretty non-theoretical pretty quickly, someone else uses rustc with SPIR-V as a target and that uses and emits Vec3 types.

view this post on Zulip Benjamin Bouvier (Feb 22 2021 at 17:19):

@Jubilee thinking about rust-gpu? If so, they're using their own rustc compiler backend implementation, which doesn't rely on cg_clif (or LLVM, for that matter). Thus there's no implied dependency on Cranelift in this particular case.

view this post on Zulip Jubilee (Feb 22 2021 at 17:20):

yep, but it means that enforcing the vector length restriction in the compiler isn't really acceptable, since both have to use the same code path.

view this post on Zulip Jubilee (Feb 22 2021 at 17:24):

So it's not that cranelift has to support emitting that code, but that we can't promise that cg_clif doesn't have to cope with getting fed a f32x3 and then spitting it back in the user's face like an indignant baby during compilation.


Last updated: Nov 22 2024 at 17:03 UTC