Sierra: a SIMD extension for C++

Nowadays, SIMD hardware is omnipresent in computers. Nonetheless, many software projects make hardly use of SIMD instructions: Applications are usually written in general-purpose languages like C++. However, general-purpose languages only provide poor abstractions for SIMD programming enforcing an error-prone, assembly-like programming style. An alternative are data-parallel languages. They indeed offer more convenience to target SIMD architectures but introduce their own set of problems. In particular, programmers are often unwilling to port their working C++ code to a new programming language. In this paper we present Sierra: a SIMD extension for C++. It combines the full power of C++ with an intuitive and effective way to address SIMD hardware. With Sierra, the programmer can write efficient, portable and maintainable code. It is particularly easy to enhance existing code to run efficiently on SIMD machines. In contrast to prior approaches, the programmer has explicit control over the involved vector lengths.