I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Rust feels like a Python developer’s idea of a high-performance computing language. It’s a great language for many kinds of applications — just not when you need to squeeze out every bit of performance from advanced hardware.
Even before getting into SIMD, try using Rust for concurrent, succinct, or external-memory data structures. It quickly becomes clear where the friction is.
Cargo is fantastic — clean, ergonomic, and a joy compared to many toolchains. But it’s much easier to keep things simple when you don’t have to support dozens of AVX-512 variants, AMX, SME, different CUDA generations, ROCm, or any of the other modern hardware capabilities.
Standardising SIMD in the standard library — in Rust or C++ — has always been a questionable idea. Most of these APIs cater to operations that compilers already auto-vectorize reasonably well, and they barely touch the recent capabilities of SIMD. Just consider how hard it is to build any meaningful abstraction over the predicate/register models across AVX-512, SVE, and RVV.
RVV aside, this should illustrate the point: https://www.modular.com/blog/understanding-simd-infinite-com...
Even before getting into SIMD, try using Rust for concurrent, succinct, or external-memory data structures. It quickly becomes clear where the friction is.
Cargo is fantastic — clean, ergonomic, and a joy compared to many toolchains. But it’s much easier to keep things simple when you don’t have to support dozens of AVX-512 variants, AMX, SME, different CUDA generations, ROCm, or any of the other modern hardware capabilities.
Standardising SIMD in the standard library — in Rust or C++ — has always been a questionable idea. Most of these APIs cater to operations that compilers already auto-vectorize reasonably well, and they barely touch the recent capabilities of SIMD. Just consider how hard it is to build any meaningful abstraction over the predicate/register models across AVX-512, SVE, and RVV.
RVV aside, this should illustrate the point: https://www.modular.com/blog/understanding-simd-infinite-com...