Hello colleague, On Wednesday, May 21, 2014 3:41:53 PM UTC+2, Tobias Knopp wrote: > > Julia does have high level SIMD constructs. > But again, does Matlab avoid temporaries in vectorized expressions? >
I dont't know, but my matlab experience (and i belong to the group of profile users and my unix insight doesn't stop at ps) shows me, that they somehow have a smart way of allocating temporaries. I was under the impression, that the point of using a high-level language is that i do not need to care what internally the processing is, i just write code that expresses what i want to calculate (i know, this is a idealized environment, but still...). matlab is now for a few years a JIT compiler and i assume that below a certain level of abstraction we would see technology like in julia. One thing i'd bet a premium bottle of tomato ketchup on, is that they have dedicated logic for array operators and an optimizer for that. In julia (and this i'm writing only as observation on the discussions here, my julia profiler and LLVM code skill are still evolving) something like A = A+B with A and B arrays seemed to be handled as allocate temp as size(A) temp = +(A,B) assign A to temp while something like add!(A,B) would be the solution without additional allocation. There might be a reason in the julia architecture why it's like this and i'm looking forward to see something like an expression level optimizer, rather than depending on LLVM internal optimizers. LLVM provides infrastructure for array datatypes but i'm missing information, how this is already used in julia. > The fact that for loops are slower than vectorized expressions in Matlab > does not mean that the vectorized code is optimal and any better than what > we have in Julia. > There is a reason why there is a MAT in the name. Some time ago i was busy in finding out why we hit a hard boundary optimizing some runtime in a simulation and (of course i could missinterpret something) align with the FPU performance of the system. In a lot of places matlab was slow and in some place it still is. For matrix and vector, basic or linear algebra matlab is reasonably fast. And exactly that situation leads to the effect that people try to vectorize things that shouldn't be vectorized.
