Sierra

Abstract

Nowadays, SIMD hardware is omnipresent in computers. Nonetheless, many software projects make hardly use of SIMD instructions: Applications are usually written in general-purpose languages like C++. However, general-purpose languages only provide poor abstractions for SIMD programming enforcing an error-prone, assembly-like programming style. An alternative are data-parallel languages. They indeed offer more convenience to target SIMD architectures but introduce their own set of problems. In particular, programmers are often unwilling to port their working C++ code to a new programming language.