"Lutger" <lutger.blijdest...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:i5jiap$rv...@digitalmars.com... > dsimcha wrote: > > ... >>> My suggestion is to include a mixin for unrolling loops. >> >> I thought about this. Simple loop unrolling doesn't seem like a very >> useful >> optimization on modern hardware because branch prediction and pipelining >> have >> gotten so good.
We shouldn't forget, D is supposed to be a systems language, so it needs to work well for a variety of embedded systems. We can't assume all CPUs are going to be just as advanced as a modern desktop CPU. Plus, as a systems language, we shouldn't rule out people who have a reason to optimize for lower-end hardware. >>It can still be useful if you also change the loop body a >> little, for example using multiple accumulators to increase instruction >> level >> parallelism, >> but this is hard to write generically. I can't think of a way to write >> such a >> mixin such that it would be both generic and useful. > > Probably not for performance, but as a utility for metaprogramming I find > it > sometimes convenient. Isn't performance the whole point of loop unrolling? What other use could there be?
