CppCon 2020

Halide is an open-source, domain-specific language for optimizing image processing, machine learning, and general array processing. It is used by major companies like Google, Adobe, and Qualcomm to optimize performance-critical software. It processes every photo taken with a Pixel phone, composites layers in every Photoshop document, and handles video processing at scale at YouTube.

We will explore how Halide achieves top-tier performance in a fraction of the development time by separating the algorithm (what to compute) from the schedule (how to optimize it). Halide's schedules determine trade-offs between parallelism, vectorization, cache locality, and memory management in a simple, modular way. Programmers can easily target different CPUs and GPUs by writing multiple schedules. Halide integrates tightly with C++ and provides both a JIT and a C++ compatible ahead-of-time compiler.