Previously, we were trying to take a uniform seed and then shuffle that
around to initialize the state for each of the program instances. This
was becoming increasingly untenable and brittle.
Now a varying seed is expected and used.
Pointers can be either uniform or varying, and behave correspondingly.
e.g.: "uniform float * varying" is a varying pointer to uniform float
data in memory, and "float * uniform" is a uniform pointer to varying
data in memory. Like other types, pointers are varying by default.
Pointer-based expressions, & and *, sizeof, ->, pointer arithmetic,
and the array/pointer duality all bahave as in C. Array arguments
to functions are converted to pointers, also like C.
There is a built-in NULL for a null pointer value; conversion from
compile-time constant 0 values to NULL still needs to be implemented.
Other changes:
- Syntax for references has been updated to be C++ style; a useful
warning is now issued if the "reference" keyword is used.
- It is now illegal to pass a varying lvalue as a reference parameter
to a function; references are essentially uniform pointers.
This case had previously been handled via special case call by value
return code. That path has been removed, now that varying pointers
are available to handle this use case (and much more).
- Some stdlib routines have been updated to take pointers as
arguments where appropriate (e.g. prefetch and the atomics).
A number of others still need attention.
- All of the examples have been updated
- Many new tests
TODO: documentation
Makefile and vcxproj file updates.
Also modified vcxproj files so that the various files ispc generates go into $(TargetDir),
not the current directory.
Modified the ray tracer example to not have uniform short-vector types in its app-visible
datatypes (these are laid out differently on SSE vs AVX); there was an existing lurking
bug in the way this was done before.
Within each function that launches tasks, we now can easily track which
tasks that function launched, so that the sync at the end of the function
can just sync on the tasks launched by that function (not all tasks
launched by all functions.)
Implementing this led to a rework of the task system API that ispc generates
code to call; the example task systems in examples/tasksys.cpp have been
updated to conform to this API. (The updated API is also documented in
the ispc user's guide.)
As part of this, "launch[n]" syntax was added to launch a number of tasks
in a single launch statement, rather than requiring a loop over 'n' to
launch n tasks.
This commit thus fixes issue #84 (enhancement to launch multiple tasks from
a single launch statement) as well as issue #105 (recursive task launches
were broken).
- In the ispc-generated header files, a #define now indicates which compilation target
was used.
- The examples use utility routines from the new file examples/cpuid.h to check the
system's CPU's capabilities to see if it supports the ISA that was used for
compiling the example code and print error messages if things aren't going to
work...
Link the appropriate clang libraries to make the preprocessor
stuff work on Windows builds. Also updated the solution files
for the examples to stop using cl.exe for preprocessing but to
just call ispc directly. Finishes fixes for issue #32.
were expecting vector-width-aligned pointers where in point of fact,
there's no guarantee that they would have been in general.
Removed the aligned memory allocation routines from some of the examples;
they're no longer needed.
No perf. difference on Core2/Core i5 CPUs; older CPUs may see some
regressions.
Still need to update the documentation for this change and finish reviewing
alignment issues in Load/Store instructions generated by .cpp files.
