Platform-independent SIMD in Go

In one line

Go 1.27 adds an experimental platform-agnostic SIMD API

Opening excerpt

Go 1.26 and 1.27 include experimental APIs for Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) operations. SIMD is a native feature of many modern CPUs that allows software to perform uniform operations across vectors of data very quickly, such as adding 8 pairs of float64 values in a single instruction. It can significantly speed up many computationally-intensive tasks, ranging from cryptography to data processing to AI. In fact, Go’s Green Tea garbage collector even makes use of SIMD to accelerate scanning memory for live objects.

Prior to these new experimental APIs, the only way to access this functionality from Go was by writing Go assembly. This was only worth it for truly performance-critical compute kernels, which meant plenty of software that could benefit from SIMD simply left a lot of the CPU unused.

Go 1.26 introduced a SIMD API for amd64, and Go 1.27 added APIs for arm64 (specifically NEON) and wasm. However, a basic challenge for a SIMD API is the enormous variation between platforms, not simply in what operations they support, but even in how vectors are represented.

(Excerpted from the original; full article via the source link below.)

This story hit the Hacker News front page today (329 points / 124 comments, via go.dev). Our Tech Radar aggregates daily signals on AI engineering, backend architecture and DevOps — browse the related services and further reading below, or get in touch with our team.