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Document number: N4008

Date: 2014-05-22

SIMD Polymorphism

by Arch Robison, Pablo Halpern, and Robert Geva

Excerpt:

N3831 [1], presented at the February 2014 Issaquah meeting, proposed (among other things) adding SIMD-enabled functions to C++. Although there was significant interest in this concept, members of the committee felt that the description in N3831 would be improved by better integrating SIMD-enabled functions with the C++ type system. This paper explores such an integration. We show that though these functions exhibit a form of polymorphism, it is best kept distinct from the existing features for polymorphism in C++. In particular, SIMD polymorphism is best not treated as C++ template instantiation or overload resolution. Instead, we propose extending the C++ type system.