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There is a lot of desire for advancement, but standardization means decisions are hard to reverse. For many, things are moving too quickly and in the wrong direction.Most Wasm proposals are very elegantly designed and effective - meaning they provide lots of value for relatively minor specification bloat. Examples are tail-calls, multi-value, custom-page-sizes, memory64 and even gc.
However, the simd and flexible-simd increased spec bloat by a lot, are not future-proof and caused more fragmentation due to non-determinism. In my opinion work should have focused on flexible-vector (SVE-like) which was more aligned to Wasm's original goals of near-native performance. The reason for this development was that simd was simpler to implement and thus users could reap benefits earlier. Unfortunately, it seems the existence of simd completely stalled development of the superior flexible-vectors proposal.
If flexible-vectors (or similar) will ever be stabilized eventually, we will end up in one of two (bad) scenarios:
1) People will have to decide between simd and flexible-vectors for their compilation, depending on their target hardware which is totally against Wasm's original goals.
2) The simd proposal will be mostly unused and deprecated. Dead weight.
Most Wasm proposals are very elegantly designed and effective - meaning they provide lots of value for relatively minor specification bloat. Examples are tail-calls, multi-value, custom-page-sizes, memory64 and even gc.
However, the simd and flexible-simd increased spec bloat by a lot, are not future-proof and caused more fragmentation due to non-determinism. In my opinion work should have focused on flexible-vector (SVE-like) which was more aligned to Wasm's original goals of near-native performance. The reason for this development was that simd was simpler to implement and thus users could reap benefits earlier. Unfortunately, it seems the existence of simd completely stalled development of the superior flexible-vectors proposal.
If flexible-vectors (or similar) will ever be stabilized eventually, we will end up in one of two (bad) scenarios:
1) People will have to decide between simd and flexible-vectors for their compilation, depending on their target hardware which is totally against Wasm's original goals.
2) The simd proposal will be mostly unused and deprecated. Dead weight.