Hi Gerald,
On Sun, 1 Mar 2020, Gerald Henriksen wrote:
Other than parallelism, which pretty much must come from the
programmer, I don't think that is a fair assessment.
A lot of Fortran users would agree with you. But others would not.
While I am not an expert on compilers every indication is that a great
deal of progress has been made by those writing them, and combined with
improvements in hardware a lot more performance has been achieved.
Overly aggressive compilers have been causing problems for accurate
numerical computations for decades and sadly the problem is not getting
better.
A lot of good optimizations get lumped into the same process as ones which
have detrimental effects. Disabling the problematic one and keeping the
ones which are useful is getting harder.
The biggest roadblock to performance is not the language(*) or
compilers, but rather the time available to profile the code and find
the bottlenecks, and deal with them.
As always, the problem is lack of person-hours.
That is not really something this list can address unless you are talking
extra diagnostic tools. And my suggestions are meant to be several orders
of magnitude less work than that.
Borrowing from C++20, but being a bit loose in my interpretation we can
introduce
likely(boolean expression)
credible(boolean expression)
unlikely(boolean expression)
I would be careful about borrowing from C++.
It is only an idea. And it is not unique to C++.
While C++ continues on it's march of adding stuff every 3 years two of
the bigger issues facing the C++ community at the moment are the
question of ABI (not relevant to Chapel at this stage) and a growing
consensus that C++ is getting too complicated.
On that last point, a lot of people agree with you there, including me.
There is little point in adding features to a language, and their
resulting maintenance overhead, if few people are going to use them.
That's why they are there/here for discussion.
Far better to expend the effort to make Chapel more popular, so people
can get the immediate gains from a cleaner route to multi-core use than
OpenMP, and multi-machine use than MPI.
Feel free to open a topic on that but don't confuse them.
Regards - Damian
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