[Libre-soc-dev] Fwd: [Libre-soc-bugs] [Bug 1229] New: fosdem2024 llvm simple-v

[Alexandre Oliva]

Hello there,

On Dec  2, 2023, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton via Libre-soc-dev <libre-soc-dev at lists.libre-soc.org> wrote:

> can i invite everyone for input and ideas on this talk proposal

Sure you can ;-)

I'm not very fond of the focus on llvm (I'm not knowledgeable at all on
it; my focus is on GCC), so I'm not sure how much use I can be of.

I have (had?) no plans to travel for FOSDEM; I suppose I could
participate remotely or in preparating for it, or even change my plans
if some funding is available, but it's a long and expensive trip for me.

(but I'd have to look at the FOSDEM CoC first; I'm generally wary of
communities that find a need to forcefully impose rules of decent
behavior; it's a red flag for me that the community faces and deals
poorly with toxicity problems, resorting to policial force and
authoritarian-attracting enforcement positions rather than to kindness
in community relationships.  Anyone got a link to it, and any thoughts
to share about it, and about how much it's been abused, as CoCs
invariably seem to be?)

> Our immediate thoughts are to leverage "int register[MAXVL] x;" where
> MAXVL is statically defined by the programmer as needed.

This comes across as misguided on two levels.  Not only does it build on
a keyword that is mostly meaningless, but it also builds new syntax on
top of it.

Is there precedent (as in preexisting implementations) of such syntax?
If not, I'd *strongly* suggest leaving it alone, and instead aiming for
some attribute-based annotation of regular arrays (like existing vector
attributes), or of loops (like openmp), so that vectorization passes in
compilers can rely on vector instructions, but the code is otherwise
readable and compilable for non-vector hardware.


> anyone is in any way aggressive, even indirectly, such as "normal"
> confrontational questions or unintentionally hostile behaviour

I hope my feedback above is not mistaken as aggressive.  Please let me
know if it comes across as such, and I'll try to adapt further to the
circumstance.


-- 
Alexandre Oliva, happy hacker                    https://FSFLA.org/blogs/lxo/
   Free Software Activist                           GNU Toolchain Engineer
Disinformation flourishes because many people care deeply about injustice but
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