faster

I think it's partly architecture compatibility. The SIMD functions exposed by Rust at the moment are all CPU-architecture-specific, but Rust code is generally expected to work seamlessly cross-platform. I believe there are plans to expose higher-level functionality as a safe interface at a later date (the API design work just hasn't been done yet). For now you can get this functionality as a 3rd-party crate https://github.com/AdamNiederer/faster

There are libraries abstracting the SIMD calls if that's what you want, e.g. faster (https://github.com/AdamNiederer/faster) or simdeez (https://github.com/jackmott/simdeez), but these have to use basic operations at the end of the day too and this post shows how to do that. I'm not sure renaming the primitive operations provided by intel/amd to something "nicer" would help much here. Using plain SIMD will always be ugly and at least you can Google the names and get back the Intel documentation without first translating from a different name.

You can use intrinsics from rust. You can use intrinsics from a lot of languages. https://github.com/AdamNiederer/faster In fact, in Rust, they are easier to use.

Since I wrote this, Rust did stabilize SIMD intrinsics, and using crates like https://github.com/AdamNiederer/faster or https://github.com/jackmott/simdeez you can write pretty idiomatic code to leverage them too. Also I believe the browsers have sped up some of the Javascript cases shown there substantially.

> Seems bad for rust that safe code is 25x slower. Most of the optimizations listed have nothing to do with unsafe, and have to do with algorithmic changes that you could apply in any language, and could apply to safe code just as well as to unsafe code. Even if we pretend all unsafe used there is necessary, and interpret the source in the worst possible light for rust - that the optimization steps would be impossible without unsafe - I think we'd only be talking 4x to 5x slower from this article, not 25x. But - I strongly suspect not all that unsafe is necessary, and the post certainly doesn't claim it is. The first code snippet uses unsafe to skip bounds checks. There are plenty of other ways to get the optimizer to skip them for you in safe code - or at the very least, hoist them out of the loop instead. This seems like a good read

Yes and no, a lot of libraries have been built on top of the feature while it was unstable. It’s been in nightly for quite a while at this point. Of course, more libraries are needed as well, but there’s already some higher level stuff. See https://github.com/AdamNiederer/faster for example. And const generics, coming to nightly near the end of the year, will be another step up. It's true overall that numeric stuff is a weakness, but we'll get there!

Yes, plus integrated branched control flow using simd masks.[1] [1] eg, random ggl link: https://gain-performance.com/2017/05/14/umesimd-tutorial-8-c... https://github.com/AdamNiederer/faster https://github.com/rayon-rs/rayon