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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
============================== Intel(r) SPMD Program Compiler ============================== Welcome to the Intel(r) SPMD Program Compiler (ispc)! ispc is a new compiler for "single program, multiple data" (SPMD) programs. Under the SPMD model, the programmer writes a program that mostly appears to be a regular serial program, though the execution model is actually that a number of program instances execute in parallel on the hardware. ispc compiles a C-based SPMD programming language to run on the SIMD units of CPUs; it frequently provides a a 3x or more speedup on CPUs with 4-wide SSE units, without any of the difficulty of writing intrinsics code. ispc is an open source compiler under the BSD license; see the file LICENSE.txt. ispc supports Windows, Mac, and Linux, with both x86 and x86-64 targets. It currently supports the SSE2, SSE4, and AVX instruction sets. For more information and examples, as well as a wiki and the bug database, see the ispc distribution site, http://ispc.github.com.