Hacker News Reader

There was a fundamental difficulty with ‘given a sufficiently smart compiler’ if I remember well revolving around automatic parallelization. You might argue that given enough time and money it might have been solved, but it’s a really hard problem.

( I might have forgotten)

View on HN

The compilers did arrive, but obviously too late. Modern pipeline optimization and register scheduling in gcc & LLVM is wildly more sophisticated than anything people were imagining in 2001.

But modern CPUs have even more capabilities on re-ordering/OOO execution and other "live" scheduling work. They will always have more information available than a ahead-of-time static scheduling from the compiler, as so much is data dependent. If it wasn't worth it they would be slashing those capabilities instead.

Statically scheduled/in order stuff is still relegated to pretty much microcontroller, or specific numeric workloads. For general computation, it still seems like a poor fit.

That's true. But if anything that cuts in the opposite direction in the argument: modern CPUs are doing all that optimization in hardware, at runtime. In software it's a no-brainer in comparison.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com