Rust has an f16 and bf16 type

[MarkReedZ]

Rust has a crate half that has an f16 and bf16 we could be using. Users would probably be using this?

• https://docs.rs/half/latest/half/index.html

Rust will be adding f16 into the core language.

• https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/116909

The addition of bf16 into the core is tracked here

• https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/3451

[ashvardanian]

Once they add, we can integrate the native type. Until then, I'd avoid dependencies.

[MarkReedZ]

Great. I added a link for bf16 above and will add these when available.

[Wyctus]

But f16 is already supported, there is even an example!

And this implementation also does not rely on the half crate. Doesn't this mean that it is also possible to introduce bf16 without a new dependency?

Or is this also blocked by the C implementation of bf16 not being ready yet?

[ashvardanian]

We don't need a C-level or Rust-level support for f16 and bf16 to implement those. Just cast an arbitrary 16-bit scalar to a similarly named type defined in SimSIMD and you ready to go 🤗

[Wyctus]

Thank you for the quick answer, but I'm a little bit lost. 🙃

So I looked into the Rust code and for example in the case of cos and f16, the simsimd_cos_f16 C function is called. But this function based on the platform uses f16 specific intrinsics (e.g. svmla_f16_x).

So I would expect that the bf16-based metrics also have some corresponding C-functions (e.g. simsimd_cos_bf16), which would rely on bf16 specific intrinsics. But I haven't found anything specific.

Do such bf16 intrinsics actually exist? I saw some bf16 related stuff for ARM NEON, and some for AVX512 but, I'm not sure what to do.

[ashvardanian]

bf16 isn't implemented yet, you can track the progress here: https://github.com/ashvardanian/SimSIMD/issues/80