Go 1.27 brings platform-independent SIMD to the language
Platform-Independent SIMD in Go
Go 1.26 and 1.27 introduce experimental SIMD APIs, with Go 1.27 adding a portable, size-agnostic simd package that hides architectural differences across amd64, arm64, and wasm. It supports write-once near-assembly performance and emulates operations on platforms without SIMD, enabling faster cryptography, data processing, and AI workloads.
The goal is to support write-once near-asm-performance “simd” code on platforms with SIMD support, and to provide a competent emulation on those platforms that do not (yet) have SIMD support.
- ImJasonH
https://imjasonh.github.io/playground/palette-swap/ swaps colors in a provided image in wasm, entirely locally in your browser, to benchmark portable SIMD vs non-portable archsimd vs non-SIMD.
Portable SIMD is ~11% slower than non-portable SIMD in this case, but both are ~5x faster than non-SIMD.
- mshockwave
Just want to say among many portable SIMD solutions I’ve seen recently (e.g. Fearless SIMD), this is the first that makes non-fixed vectors like SVE and RISC-V vector (RVV) easier to support. Glad to see they made this decision
- u8
This is why I love Go. Nobody was asking for this, but they took the time to do it right and continue to Push go as a memory safe, high-level systems language.
- sixdimensional
I did some testing with the experimental SIMD on a project I was doing to make speech-to-text and text-to-speech models run natively in Go (with CGO_ENABLED=0, so no C depenencies), and testing non-SIMD w/ SIMD.
I don't have formal benchmarks for that, but I can anecdotally say the SIMD work made a measurable improvement in the performance of the calculations vs. just plain Go. I'm very optimistic about how these improvements will help make the Go runtime an even better target for more of these types of work going forward, especially since it is cross-platform.
- beached_whale
C++ is getting std::simd in the latest version and I am all aboard writing the vectorization with the least amount of intrinsic builtins I am able to. Even if not optimal, it's far better than the scalar ops.
- melodyogonna
Very neat, and comes pretty close to how Mojo handles portable SIMD.
It's great to see two of my favorite languages finally making SIMD easy to use. It's such low-hanging fruit for performance, yet somehow languages have ignored it for years. Portable SIMD, even with some performance penalty, still beats scalar computation whenever vector operations are needed. Yet language implementations always seemed to assume that hardware-specific SIMD APIs were the only way to go. That did nothing but make SIMD unusable excepting special cases where performance is absolutely critical, rather than just something anyone can use in day to day programming.
- metaltyphoon
For God sake, add a syntax highlighting on the official page! Otherwise this is awesome
- qprofyeh
This feature opens many doors for optimizing low-level performance in Go projects, that are already running multicore. IIRC there aren’t a lot of languages with built-in std lib support for SIMD and variants. Love the way Go is trying new stuff lately.