On 23/03/11 21:45, Mathieu - wrote:
However I have some questions about the subject in order to do my proposal, some of them have already been discussed with Joel Falcou and Mathias Gaunard on IRC, but here it is : One of the main concern I have is that nt2 relies heavily on cmake to detect various things like SSE instruction set support etc. From what I know (I ported nt2 to OpenBSD a while ago), depending on the architecture different methods are used, in order to be portable, like reading from sysctl in OSX or lauching a little executable which collect various informations using cpuid. So the question is : is bjam able to do everything we need to do, or will we need to do the detection in any other way?
The SIMD capability detection is only needed by the compilation step for the unit tests and user code. It can be delayed there. Maybe bjam can ask for specific stuff like that on the user on the command line ?
Another thing that is a bit blur for me at the moment, is what is the scope of boost.simd? I mean, from what I see the simd part is quite deep-rooted in nt2, has dependencies on several modules of it, so will boost.simd be a subset of nt2 simd module or will we need to rewrite part of it to avoid dragging huge dependencies (and well, end up doing boost.nt2).
the nt2 part of simd to be leveraged should be the core pack abstraction, the simd range adaptors and first the basic operators + roughly an equivalent of libm or some such. We use some other stuff that can live in boost::details.