portable-simd VS cargo-make

Jubilee and Caleb Zulawski for their tireless work on the portable SIMD project. It will land, some day, and when it does it's going to be an amazing boon for the project.

The portable SIMD project implements an as_simd() function for slices. The basics are that you get 3 slices and the middle one is a SIMD slice. It allows for fast aligned loads of the data, which could matter if your algorithm is becoming memory bound; it is also a convenient and safe abstraction. In my case, I actually have 2 vectors (say, x and y). I can take them apart using as_simd() like so:

Rust has generics and monomorphization. You can write the algorithm once and compile for multiple targets. rust-lang/portable-simd

This Rust issue [0] was the best short summary of what an SIMD Shuffle is I could find:

„A "shuffle", in SIMD terms, takes a SIMD vector (or possibly two vectors) and a pattern of source lane indexes (usually as an immediate), and then produces a new SIMD vector where the output is the source lane values in the pattern given.“

[0] https://github.com/rust-lang/portable-simd/issues/11

Yet by default it generates code which is only compatible with Pentium4 or newer. In fact lots of serious issues relate to older CPUs and rustc developers plan is to declare them closed when they would be able to drop i686 support (all AMD CPUs which support SSE2 support x86-64, too while Intel situation is mess).

The standard API crate for portable simd is at https://github.com/rust-lang/portable-simd, but using this requires nightly, which I don't want to do. I'd like to use a crate for simd that works on both x86_64 and wasm in stable rust. wide looks fine for this purpose. Are there any potentially better choices?

See: https://github.com/rust-lang/portable-simd

As for portable SIMD, there's relatively recent activity (last commit 20 days ago) on this repository: https://github.com/rust-lang/portable-simd

cargo-make aims to be an extensive Rust-written task runner that additionally lets you define workflows to execute your tasks. You can install it using cargo install cargo-make.

You might be interested in cargo-make, which is based on TOML, or Just, which has a syntax that is vaguely inspired by Make but much less weird sigils and more suited to non-file-based tasks.

I would like to rewrite this project in Rust, but I am not so familiar with Cargo as I am with Make. Is it possible to declare these kinds of rules and targets ? Should I use a build script, a custom tool like cargo-make or something else ? What do you think ?

I use just myself, and I personally don't want projects' codebase to decide when something gets cargo installed on my system. For people who feel that's more acceptable, I'll note that cargo-make has first class support for the idea of expressing a task that depends on a cargo plugin:

Thank you for the help, created ticket #787 and #788!

https://github.com/sagiegurari/cargo-make

I ended up using it over just because it felt easier to use cross platform, and toml seemed like a right choice

cargo make is used pretty extensively in Bottlerocket OS

Cargo is a pretty robust build tool on it's own, but for that extra automated workflow oomph, I also use cargo-make