Skip to content

Conversation

guitargeek
Copy link
Contributor

@guitargeek guitargeek commented Oct 9, 2025

The vc flag enabled two features:

  1. Some vectorized Math functions, but they didn't get adopted much by our users because you need to use specific SIMD types.
  2. A vectorized backend for the VecCore-powered TFormula implementation, but this doesn't pass the unit tests.

Two drawbacks of removing it:

  1. If the user go through the effort of using the SIMD types for vectorization, we can expect them to implement the required math functions themselves (ROOT didn't provide many any way, VectorizedTMath.cxx had only 250 lines).
  2. In the cases where the VecCore/Vc backend for TFormula actually worked and the user enabled vectorization via the TFormula constructor argument, there might be a performance regression.

The upside of removing it:

  1. We remove code that is untested in the CI because enabled it makes tests fail (see this CI test run). Leaving it might harm users with silently wrong results.
  2. Get rid on one (builtin) dependency.
  3. Reduced build option matrix.
  4. We don't need to worry about how/if builtin Vc headers should be available at install time.
  5. Vc is in maintainance mode and no longer actively developed (see it's README)

Closes also the following issues:

Copy link

github-actions bot commented Oct 9, 2025

Test Results

    21 files      21 suites   3d 20h 9m 0s ⏱️
 3 689 tests  3 683 ✅ 0 💤  6 ❌
75 632 runs  75 622 ✅ 0 💤 10 ❌

For more details on these failures, see this check.

Results for commit 57c38f5.

♻️ This comment has been updated with latest results.

@guitargeek
Copy link
Contributor Author

The failure on alma8 is unrelated: it is a artifact from upgrading Python on that platform and doing incremental builds, so it's still looking for the Python3.8 development files that are gone.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Labels

None yet

Projects

None yet

Development

Successfully merging this pull request may close these issues.

1 participant