This feature opens many doors for optimizing low-level performance in Go projects, that are already running multicore. IIRC there aren’t a lot of languages with built-in std lib support for SIMD and variants. Love the way Go is trying new stuff lately.
Besides the usual C and C++, we have Java, .NET, D, Zig, Julia, Swift, Rust.
So yeah, also appreciate have Go in the group instead of manually having to write Assembly.
However not many languages adopt ways to manually write SIMD, because most of us have no idea how to write good SIMD code in first place, I surely don't.
FWIW, there is some pretty substantial autovectorization work that is already in-flight for Go.
It's being driven by an external contributor who has landed some good changes in the past to the Go compiler. (I think the autovectorization work might be part of their PhD or other academic research, but not sure.)
It's hard to make predictions with an open source project, but my personal guess is some flavor of it will land (including it is already demonstrating good results without an enormous level of code complexity in the compiler and without overly slowing down compile speeds), but I guess we'll see.
As a first step, it might be possible to write a linter rule that rewrites suitable numeric loops to SIMD. There are already rules to rewrite several loop types, so that should be doable.
So yeah, also appreciate have Go in the group instead of manually having to write Assembly.
However not many languages adopt ways to manually write SIMD, because most of us have no idea how to write good SIMD code in first place, I surely don't.
The one negative I'd say is that often autovectorisation is 'good enough' and this doesn't really tackle that gap.
It's being driven by an external contributor who has landed some good changes in the past to the Go compiler. (I think the autovectorization work might be part of their PhD or other academic research, but not sure.)
There's a CL stack here:
https://go.dev/cl/791740
It's hard to make predictions with an open source project, but my personal guess is some flavor of it will land (including it is already demonstrating good results without an enormous level of code complexity in the compiler and without overly slowing down compile speeds), but I guess we'll see.
While reaching out to CGO is the easier way, it doesn't mean it is the only tool available in Go.