We're announcing the start of the Portable SIMD Project Group within the Libs team. This group is dedicated to making a portable SIMD API available to stable Rust users.

The Portable SIMD Project Group is lead by @calebzulawski, @Lokathor, and @workingjubilee.

What are project groups?

Rust uses project groups to help coordinate work. They're a place for people to get involved in helping shape the parts of Rust that matter to them.

What is SIMD?

SIMD stands for Single Instruction, Multiple Data. It lets the CPU apply a single instruction to a "vector" of data. The vector is a single extra-wide CPU register made of multiple "lanes" of the same data type. You can think of it as being similar to an array. Instead of processing each lane individually, all lanes have the same operation applied simultaneously. This lets you transform data much faster than with standard code. Not every problem can be accelerated with "vectorized" code, but for multimedia and list-processing applications there can be significant gains.

Why do you need to make it portable?

Different chip vendors offer different SIMD instructions. Some of these are available in Rust's std::arch module. You can build vectorized functions using that, but at the cost of maintaining a different version for each CPU you want to support. You can also not write vectorized operations and hope that LLVM's optimizations will "auto-vectorize" your code. However, the auto-vectorizer is easily confused and can fail to optimize "obvious" vector tasks.

The portable SIMD API will enable writing SIMD code just once using a high-level API. By explicitly communicating your intent to the compiler, it's better able to generate the best possible final code. This is still only a best-effort process. If your target doesn't support a desired operation in SIMD, the compiler will fall back to using scalar code, processing one lane at a time. The details of what's available depend on the build target.

We intend to release the Portable SIMD API as std::simd. We will cover as many use cases as we can, but it might still be appropriate for you to use std::arch directly. For that reason the std::simd types will also be easily convertable to std::arch types where needed.

How can I get involved?

Everyone can get involved! No previous experience necessary. If you'd like to help make portable SIMD a reality you can visit our GitHub repository or reach out on Zulip and say hi! :wave: