[librasteve]

This is an awesome achievement. I am not so sure how you made it 4x slower than C … since it strikes me that you have 1:1 mapping to asm, perhaps vector benchmarks are unfair for this kind of comparison.

To those who criticize use of LLM in projects like yours, I demur - where there are productivity gains to be had, LLMs can make small niche FOSS projects like yours more viable and less drudgery.

I prefer a concise language btw:

  say “hello, raku”;
  say (0, 1, *+* ... *)[10];

This is more by way of saying let 1000 flowers bloom.

(The main strength of Raku is its built in Grammars https://slangify.org)

[octalide]

Thanks! The speed is almost entirely a dramatic optimization difference. From what I can tell, most of that difference comes from vectorization (like you stated) and other things like target-specific machine code optimization happening post-codegen.

Mach will eventually get to that point for most targets (or as close as possible). I stated 4x slower as the worst case I've observed so far. In some cases, we were only about 1.3x slower which is fantastic IMO.

LLMs were critical for me to be able to do this. I did not understand how compilers worked when I started this project. Once I was able to understand it, having an LLM churn out the enormous amounts of code was the only way for me to ever have been able to practically release a working codebase in a reasonable timeframe. It leaves a bad taste in peoples mouths (even mine), but it's an invaluable tool that simply can't go overlooked these days. To say mach was "vibe coded" is completely incorrect. To say it was largely "implemented" (typed out) by an AI is far closer to reality. I plan to use that tool for the rest of my career.

That's okay if you prefer something else! Mach isn't made to be the "please everyone" language! I'm glad you took the time to check it out and shared your opinion with me :)