Use SIMD internally

[gnzlbg]

The sleef library is available with the Boost software license (extremely permissive) and implements the libm intrinsics using SIMD instructions when possible. It currently supports:

This library currently supports several SIMD architectures :

• x86 - SSE2, SSE4.1, AVX, FMA4, AVX2+FMA3, AVX512F
• AArch64 - Advanced SIMD, SVE
• AArch32 - NEON
• PowerPC64 - VSX

libm should use cfg(target_feature) (stable) internally to detect the availability of SIMD instructions at compile-time and use them when it is possible and pays off.

We could add an unstable cargo feature to libm to enable using nightly only features to detect and use asimd, neon, vsx, and AVX-512 (there are still unstable in core::arch). Some asimd, neon, vsx and AVX-512 intrinsics are already available in core::arch in nightly, and it shouldn't be too difficult to add anyone that's missing.

As long as we include the proper contribution notice, and maybe dual license the library under the Boost license (this should be easily possible), we could reuse 1:1 the sleef implementation which competes performance wise with libm and intel's libraries. There is a commit under review to add Sleef to LLVM, but it has been stalled for over a year.

[hanna-kruppe]

Just so we're clear, are you talking about the scalar functions provided by sleef (e.g., double Sleef_sin_u10(double a);) or also about the element-wise operations on vectors?

[gnzlbg]

are you talking about the scalar functions provided by sleef (e.g., double Sleef_sin_u10(double a);)

The scalar functions, with an error of 1 ULPs (those with the _u10 suffix).

[burrbull]

sleef-rs
sleefdp and sleefsp files ported from sleef library
not tested yet

[gnzlbg]

@burrbull the sleef-sys crate (wrapper over the C library - what we are trying to avoid here) is used by packed_simd and is tested - sleef only supports x86_64 linux, x86_64 apple, and x86_64 windows. Currently, 32-bit linux is advertised but not workin, so that heavily limits the targets where it can be used. You can probably add sleef-sys as a dev dependency to test sleef-rs against sleef in those architectures at least though.