Hacker News Reader

Comment by agumonkey | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen a non asm low level language that could fit hardware better than C ? Not starting a flamewar, just that it seems that you're in a context where you may have reviewed things we might not know of.

View on HN

I hear tell that a lot of the places where modern Fortran shows up are contexts where faster-than-C performance is desirable.

But that's plausibly the compiler doing its magic. Or is there anything in Fortran language/semantics that maps close to vectorized ISAs ?

A company I used to work for has spent 30 years trying to migrate FORTRAN code to C. I was not involved in the project, so I don't know the details, but the gist of what I was told is that there are edge cases where FORTRAN stomps C in every performance metric. So you can make decent progress for a while, but you'll eventually hit a major roadblock that halts progress.

I think of the BLAS algos as being very Fortran friendly, and the Fortran references never _out_perform the C implementations. (The asm implementations are of course the best.)

Be curious to know what you're thinking of here.

I've no personal experience, but people historically point to pointer aliasing as the primary thing that speeds up Fortran code vs C.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointer_aliasing

No personal experience either but discussing with people invested in high perf C, they said that `restrict` was enough to avoid aliasing issues.

I've done some bare-metal development in Ada. It was originally designed for embedded systems, so it has features that fit this niche very well. It's definitely not as simple as C, it has a much more modern design however.

ISPC in this case is exactly that. It makes vectorization fairly easy and very fast.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com