If you take a modern C++ or Rust compiler and think about optimizing it…
There’s lots of “low-hanging fruit” in the form of incrementality and parallelism.

Not truly “low-hanging” as in easy to implement; it’s actually extremely hard. But it’s easy to theorize about. It’s known to be *possible*, and capable of massive speedups in various cases.

But what about the rest? How much room is there for large speedups just by optimizing algorithms? To me that feels like much more of an unknown.

@comex I have this idea that compilers represent data incorrectly for modern platforms. Currently we have a vast ocean of tiny nodes full of pointers, and we just follow pointers all day. what we need is regular, tabular internal representations that we can throw onto tensor cores

@regehr @comex @shriramk not even for “tensor cores”! There’s a couple orders of magnitude available on CPU this way.

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@regehr @steve @comex @shriramk even where you need tree data structures, plenty of use cases where you can improve coherency and reduce the working set by storing levels within the tree densely and calculating offsets into the next row

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