[HALtheWise]

What's your perspective on variable-width SIMD instruction sets (like ARM SVE or the RISC-V V extension)? How does developer ergonomics and code performance compare to traditional SIMD? Are we approaching a world with fewer different SIMD instruction sets to program for?

[janwas]

Var-width SIMD can mostly be written using the exact same Highway code, we just have to be careful to avoid things like arrays of vectors and sizeof(vector).

It can be more complicated to write things which are vector-length dependent, such as sorting networks or transposes, but we have always found a way so far.

On the contrary, there are increasing numbers of ISAs, including the two LoongArch LSX/LASX, AVX-512 which is really really good on Zen5, and three versions of Arm SVE. RISC-V V also has lots of variants and extensions. In such a world, I would not want to have to implement per-platform implementations.