digitalmars.D - Generative programming research project
- Andrei Alexandrescu (2/2) Dec 01 2017 http://ascr-discovery.science.doe.gov/2017/11/language-barrier/
- H. S. Teoh (17/18) Dec 01 2017 [...]
- Ola Fosheim =?UTF-8?B?R3LDuHN0YWQ=?= (11/16) Dec 01 2017 Well, not sure where they are heading, but this seems to focus on
- H. S. Teoh (53/69) Dec 01 2017 Removing indirection smells like something specific to languages like
- Ola Fosheim =?UTF-8?B?R3LDuHN0YWQ=?= (10/25) Dec 01 2017 Well, yes, but matrix optimization is particularly tricky since
http://ascr-discovery.science.doe.gov/2017/11/language-barrier/ Andrei
Dec 01 2017
On Fri, Dec 01, 2017 at 02:33:29PM -0500, Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d wrote:http://ascr-discovery.science.doe.gov/2017/11/language-barrier/[...] The article keeps talking about how generative programming is supposedly the future, yet it's rather scant on descriptions of what generative programming actually *is*. For all I can tell, you could substitute "Java" and "OO" as alternative buzzwords and it would read almost exactly like Java promotional material from the 90's. Fortunately, googling found the github repository, which contains links to more concrete information than can be found through the article: http://stanford-ppl.github.io/Delite/ There's a link to the OptiML spec that, thankfully, makes it clear that this is something primarily focused on machine learning and certain categories of algorithms, rather than a one-size-fits-all miracle cure that's slated to take over the entire programming world. T -- Be in denial for long enough, and one day you'll deny yourself of things you wish you hadn't.
Dec 01 2017
On Friday, 1 December 2017 at 19:43:53 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:There's a link to the OptiML spec that, thankfully, makes it clear that this is something primarily focused on machine learning and certain categories of algorithms, rather than a one-size-fits-all miracle cure that's slated to take over the entire programming world.Well, not sure where they are heading, but this seems to focus on DSLs: http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2015/5029/pdf/19.pdf «As mentioned in Section 1 and throughout the paper, we argue for a rethinking of the role of high-level languages in performance critical code. In particular, as our work and the work of others have shown, generative abstractions and DSLs can help in achieving high performance by programmatically removing indirection, enabling domain-specific optimizations, and mapping code to parallel and heterogeneous platforms.»
Dec 01 2017
On Fri, Dec 01, 2017 at 08:10:03PM +0000, Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d wrote:On Friday, 1 December 2017 at 19:43:53 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:Removing indirection smells like something specific to languages like Java where (almost) everything is a class. In idiomatic D, temporaries tend to be more stack-based structs, and even with heap data the number of indirections tend to be less, at least IME. Generative abstractions seem similar in concept to D's metaprogramming capabilities. Domain-specific optimizations is something I've been thinking about for a long time now. As hinted to in the article, today's programming landscape seems to be concentrated around two extremes: high-level abstractions where you're basically relying on the compiler to do the optimizations for you, and low-level tweaking where you basically take over the reins and do it yourself, from ground zero. The problem is that a general-purpose optimizer can't possibly anticipate everything that you might want to accomplish, so it can only implement general optimizations, limited by the undecidability of the halting problem in the most general case. And on the other extreme, taking things into your own hands has the limitation that you may not be able to do what a few decades of compiler optimization work has achieved, so the success rate is lower with a much higher time investment cost. But if the powerful optimizers of modern compilers can be accessed more directly from the source code, we may be able to glean at least some of the best from both worlds. If we were able to provide domain-specific hints to the optimizer, it may be able to do its job better than when it can only guess at your intentions. As a simple example, suppose we were to implement matrix algebra as a user-defined type. There are two approaches: one is to implement each operation as a separate function, which has the disadvantage that since the compiler doesn't know matrix algebra, it's unable to refactor matrix expressions to a more efficient form for execution. The other is to implement a full-fledged expression template system, which is basically taking over the reins and telling the compiler how a matrix expression ought to be implemented. The problem with that is that your chosen expression template optimizations may not be optimal for the machine you're targeting, if you're writing a library and cannot control what machines users will run it on. You also cannot easily leverage future improvements in the optimizer because you've committed to a specific implementation strategy in the expression template. But suppose there is a way to tell the compiler certain invariants, i.e., mathematical identities, that matrix expressions satisfy. You could express, for example, the fact that matrix multiplication is associative and commutative, or that certain expressions always have a constant (or easily-computed) result. Then you let the optimizer decide which of these identities to use when optimizing a matrix expression, based on its detailed knowledge of the target machine architecture. Essentially, you're *educating* the optimizer with domain-specific knowledge, and thereby enabling it to perform optimizations that it may otherwise not be able to figure out on its own. If this can be pulled off, it would allow us to have both domain-specific optimizations *and* a general-purpose programming framework. T -- People tell me that I'm paranoid, but they're just out to get me.There's a link to the OptiML spec that, thankfully, makes it clear that this is something primarily focused on machine learning and certain categories of algorithms, rather than a one-size-fits-all miracle cure that's slated to take over the entire programming world.Well, not sure where they are heading, but this seems to focus on DSLs: http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2015/5029/pdf/19.pdf «As mentioned in Section 1 and throughout the paper, we argue for a rethinking of the role of high-level languages in performance critical code. In particular, as our work and the work of others have shown, generative abstractions and DSLs can help in achieving high performance by programmatically removing indirection, enabling domain-specific optimizations, and mapping code to parallel and heterogeneous platforms.»
Dec 01 2017
Ola Fosheim =?UTF-8?B?R3LDuHN0YWQ=?= On Friday, 1 December 2017 at 20:26:41 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:But suppose there is a way to tell the compiler certain invariants, i.e., mathematical identities, that matrix expressions satisfy. You could express, for example, the fact that matrix multiplication is associative and commutative, or that certain expressions always have a constant (or easily-computed) result. Then you let the optimizer decide which of these identities to use when optimizing a matrix expression, based on its detailed knowledge of the target machine architecture. Essentially, you're *educating* the optimizer with domain-specific knowledge, and thereby enabling it to perform optimizations that it may otherwise not be able to figure out on its own.Well, yes, but matrix optimization is particularly tricky since it depends on so many factors that are hard to deal with for a regular programming language. Is the matrix symmetric, Hermitian, persymmetric, centrosymmetric, Toeplitz, Hankel, triangular…If this can be pulled off, it would allow us to have both domain-specific optimizations *and* a general-purpose programming framework.One certainly need som better way to extend the type system with domain specific high level optimizations and then something that translates it all the way down. Currently high level optimizations seems to be mostly off the table... I'm sure matlab does some of those, but not sure how extensive it is.
Dec 01 2017