Hacker News Reader

float4 is nice, but in video games, especially graphics, the vast majority of our floats are 32 bits but we also use 16 bits floats quite extensively, and in this case it is quite practical to follow the same convention. f32 -> f16 f32x4 -> f16x4

And when working on some heavily optimized SIMD code on the CPU side, I tend to use the default types even less.

View on HN

My preference for float4 comes from HLSL so I'm aware. For vectors of 16 bit floats my preference would be half4 etc. (Although I do concede that in HLSL land that doesn't actually do what you want on older language versions.)

IMO including the number of bits in all primitive types is usually an overcorrection from trauma caused by C/C++'s historic loose definitions of primitive type sizes. However I don't write much CPU SIMD code and can definitely see how you'd develop your preference from that context.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com