Reply To: C semantics and the Mill

I agree that C functions returning structs just to return multiple results is ugly. Syntactic sugar would help everyone I think. But that’s really a compiler thing and not a chip thing.

Its useful to consider the two ways we use vectors on a CPU – long and short. This blog post does a good job explaining the distinction. The Mill, of course, supports both.

So at a C level you may find yourself decorating short vectors explicitly (using the extensions compilers already offer) and we’ll work in the compiler back-ends to make sure that works much as it does on other CPUs. But we also make it easy for the compiler to do auto-vectorization and to pipeline a lot more than on other architectures.

So to unlock the full power of the Mill you don’t need to rewrite your C programs – normal C maps great to the Mill (which is no accident).

Modern compilers are aligning on how to extend with type, function and variable attributes so I could imagine we expose saturating and excepting arithmetic as well as some of the Mill security mechanisms that way. This won’t preclude people using toolchains where the frontend doesn’t know that that the target is a Mill, though, of course.