[llvm-dev] Scalable Vector Types in IR - Next Steps?

[Renato Golin via llvm-dev]

On Fri, 15 Mar 2019 at 15:58, David Greene <dag at cray.com> wrote:
> See the reply I just posted to Hal.  I am not sure we've made a decision
> to abandon the current patches.  We may in fact decide that, but I
> haven't seen consensus for doing so yet.  In fact I've seen the opposite
> -- that people want to move forward with the scalable types.

I did see that reply.

While, like Hal, I do understand some concerns on introducing a
radical new concept to IR (the reason why I started this thread), I'm
unaware (mainly by not being on that meeting) of the individual issues
and how controversial they were with those involved.

Furthermore, the current state is uncertain and people need to be
convinced more of what will work by means of hacking up more
intrinsics and more kludge into the current IR.

This means that, even if we are to implement it natively in IR, it
won't come *before* we implement it with intrinsics, which will
hopefully convince people that this makes sense, and by which time,
the code will look completely different and we'll need a completely
new patch.

Ie. the current series is already dead, no matter what we do.

cheers,
--renato