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Comment by marmaduke | Hacker News Reader

It’s not a jab at Julia, really rather that ISPC provides a workable model that would later on be nice to see elsewhere.

> find it incredible that these kinds of extensions can be built in packages thanks to the fact that Julia's compiler is extensible

Come on, jeez.. Julia’s compiler is a Lisp-based LLVM driver: of course it can do these things.

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ISPC can be really good at SIMD-ing complicated control flow (ray tracers being the archetypal example). I'm interested in eventually working on something like that for Julia. In the mean time, it should be possible to deliberately write code to be compatible with something like SIMD.jl. I think I'd work on a project of trying to get that working via multiple dispatch with at least a moderately complex project, and let those experiences inform the kind of transforms an automatic compiler would need to both work and get good performance.

> It’s not a jab at Julia

I didn't take it as such; there are legitimate shortcomings to any tool, I just wanted to provide pointers to other readers that the devs are aware of it, and that there is ongoing development to address it. :)

> Come on, jeez.. Julia’s compiler is a Lisp-based LLVM driver: of course it can do these things.

As someone who, before Julia, was firmly entrenched in C/C++/Python land, I suppose I am discovering many of these "obvious" things for the first time. :)

> I suppose I am discovering many of these "obvious" things

sorry for the flippant remark then! it's great to be in discover mode, enjoy ;)

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