Wasm long vectors

April 13, 2020 ยท View on GitHub

This presentation describes one way to extend Wasm SIMD, by defining longer (flexible) vectors in the spirit of existing Wasm semantics. This has been presented at a Wasm SIMD sync call at 2019-11-06.

View or download prebuilt PDF.

Scope

Provide length-agnostic operations to support various SIMD hardware.

While true vector instruction sets are an interesting topic, they are not yet widespread enough in consumer hardware to warrant a WebAssembly proposal. Should they become widespread, this can be extended to support them.

This proposal is also not about modifying existing WebAssembly SIMD proposal - simd128 is a very mature proposal that inspired this work, but it has uses and implementations and it would not be worth holding it up to test out an early-stage idea.

Existing solutions

Runtime SIMD wrappers:

Building slides

Build prerequisites are texlive and beamer; source should be recognized by most TeX editors. To build using GNU make:

$ make