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
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).
Old run_tests.sh still lives (for now).
Changes include:
- Tests are run in parallel across all of the available CPU cores
- Option to create a statically-linked executable for each test
(rather than using the LLVM JIT). This is in particular useful
for AVX, which doesn't have good JIT support yet.
- Static executables also makes it possible to test x86, not
just x86-64, codegen.
- Fixed a number of tests in failing_tests, which were actually
failing due to the fact that the expected function signature of
tests had changed.
