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Comment by Sirupsen | Hacker News Reader

Great question. The biggest reason is that Go was what the team was most familiar with when the engine moved from Javascript. The reason today is that the engine is 40K LOC of Go, so a full-blown rewrite would be a big deal. As the post goes into depth with, we have a lot of rope left before we need to get to SIMD/GPGPU. Once we hit those computational bottlenecks in Go, we're very open to changing our mind!

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Now that you have decent data structures, why don't you use a library for arithmetic calculations on vectors? I would use MKL for this, at least if you're running on Intel machines, the vdMul function for your particular example. Even on AMD machines the MKL implementation will probably be faster than hand-written code.

Go supports custom assembly, have you considered just polyfilling the SIMD functions manually?

Yes, I didn't mean to imply we wouldn't go far to squeeze Go further! At some point the downside of the complexity of dropping down from Go to intrinsics, bypassing the GC, etc. might overwhelm the benefits of staying with Go. We've spent a while writing simulations like the ones in the post to understand Go's GC's behaviour under lots of pressure, and it won't be a bottleneck for a long time. I also think that doing all the pre-requisite work to make SIMD remotely possibly will yield _far_ more performance than SIMD itself.

GC pressure is the cause of many of your competitors' problems. I'd be planning a move to an alternative sooner rather than later otherwise you'll run into the exact same problems that they have - after a certain point in the company's life it becomes practically impossible to fix

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