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by sqrt17 4452 days ago
I might be a stickler here, but this strikes me as a good example of a "domain-specific language" rather than of a general programming language.

Now, it's certainly possible to nail general-purpose programming features onto a DSL (e.g. matlab or R), but the approach (also used by Halide) to embed the DSL into a general-purpose language that allows you to do so (here:C++) is, in my eyes, vastly better suited for scaling up from experimentation code to something that can become part of a larger system (think OpenCV in robotics etc.)

1 comments

They don't advertise it as a general programming language. The end of the video they specifically state it only works with optimizing algorithms that deal with images. General stuff like trees, they have no application towards.
The general domain of applicability is data parallel processing. There is very little that is image specific in Halide. So audio, dense linear algebra, some finite element applications, etc. would also be well within the domain.