Re: Pre-built binaries vs. performance

[Ludovic Courtès]

Heya,

Fis Trivial <address@hidden> skribis:

>>> Instructions support seems like just another kind of runtime dependency,
>>> can we reconsider this:
>>> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2015-01/msg00166.html
>>
>> What do you mean?  The thread you’re referring to doesn’t discuss
>> architecture-specific optimizations.
>>
>> Ludo’.
>
> It's not architecture specific. But we can treat architecture as one of
> the runtime dependency, right? For example, openBlas depends on SSE
> instructions set, but, optionally it can depends on AVX2. (Not a perfect
> example since openblas can optimize itself at runtime, but hopefully you
> can understand the idea)
>
> So, we can build packages in a generic way, and then provide optional
> dependencies.
> In this case, we treat SSE as default dependency and AVX2 as an optional
> dependency, let users specify whether they want it or not.
> AVX2 need not to be actual packages, it's just an abstraction.
>
> It's just a thought that we can abstract architecture as part of the
> dependency graph.

Yeah, I see what you mean.  It would be nice, but it seems quite far
stretched from the current design; I wouldn’t know how to do that.

Ludo’.