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Vectorized and performance-portable Quicksort (2022)

174 points · 31 comments · mococa

  1. mixologic · · focus · HN ↗
    > Our implementation uses Highway's portable SIMD functions, so we do not have to re-implement about 3,000 lines of C++ for each platform.

    Would they do the same thing today or have an LLM re-implement those 3000 lines of c++ ?

    1. glouwbug · · focus · HN ↗
      Guys, remember when language features allowed re-usability?
      1. shadowgovt · · focus · HN ↗
        Barely, and rarely for C++ specifically.

        I think software engineering in general is in a bit of a discoverability crisis. So many problems actually have solutions implemented... Somewhere. If you know about them. And are speaking the same vocabulary as the original implementer to realize the solution might be applicable to your problem. It&#x27;s one of the reasons that jokes exist about microservice frameworks (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ) and how &quot;We use Hadoop to store the output from our Kafka pipe, that&#x27;s populated from our Traefik layer, all monitored with Grafana in front of Loki and Prometheus, of course&quot; is a real sentence that has actual meaning and not a fever-dream.

        LLMs are actually pretty impressive at being able to pull together disparate information from various domains into one place.

        1. glouwbug · · focus · HN ↗
          I&#x27;m not sure I follow. C++ just added a SIMD library for this exact problem. And even then, SIMD-intrinsic-free C++ with the right data structures and some basic hardware understanding gets you mostly there in a hardware agnostic portable way.
          1. shadowgovt · · focus · HN ↗
            They&#x27;ve added a new library to a language and stdlib so crammed full of features that its specification exceeds the size of the King James Bible by wordcount.

            That&#x27;s what I mean about &quot;discoverability crisis.&quot; This post is how I learned about the existence of the SIMD library.

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