[tvirosi]

Huh? Half precision floats speeds up machine learning training and inference enormously. It's weird to me to argue that we should sacrifice hours of sliced off waiting time in favor of preserving the ability to write a new language over a weekend.

[aseipp]

The entire blog post is literally an explanation of why implementing support for fp16 in Futhark was annoying. Let me repeat the key bit: support for fp16 in Futhark. As in, it exists, and you can use it. Right now! Nobody is stopping you from using it, or encouraging you not to use it. In fact the author literally gave you the ability to use it in his language, because clearly people want to use it. The literal second paragraph acknowledges not only that fp16 is popular in machine learning, but that there is actually two popular formats now, including bf16!

The post is actually quite relatable if you have experience in silly toolchain issues, i.e. worked on a compiler or something like that. It's all fairly straightforward. Please try to read the article next time, you might surprise yourself.

[tvirosi]

No need for a tone like that

[gpderetta]

computation will be slower but writing new languages will be faster. Think of how many new languages you can implement while you wait for your computation to finish!!