Halide 13.0.0

[alexreinking]

We are pleased to announce the release of Halide 13.0.0!

This is a major release. Most notably, Halide now requires C++17 (or higher).

You can download one of our binary releases here, or check one of the following package repositories (they might take some time to be updated):

• Vcpkg: https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg/tree/master/ports/halide
• Homebrew: https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/halide

Language and Compiler

• The compiler now requires C++17 or higher. (Require C++17 for Halide. #5282)
• Overloads of realize() that were deprecated in Halide 12 are now removed. (Remove deprecated realize() variants from Func and PIpeline #6122, Remove deprecated realize() Python wrapprs #6162)
• Added new predicated tail strategies for split loops. (Add TailStrategy::PredicateLoads and TailStrategy::PredicateStores #6126)
• Added a more fine-grained prefetch directive. (Add more fine-grained prefetch() directive (Issue #3735) #6155)
• Compiler now always runs in a separate 32MB stack on all platforms. (compiler stack usage improvements #6239)
• Fixed a semantics bug where data-dependent loads might be uninitialized on over-compute. (Add ClampUnsafeAccesses pass. #6294)
• Using MemoryType::Stack may now trigger a real stack allocation for dynamically-sized allocations discovered to be small at runtime (store_in(MemoryType::Stack) should use alloca if the size is small #6289)

Backends

• Simplifier improvements saw a >10% reduction in peak memory usage in many apps, including camera_pipe, harris, nl_means, and stencil_chain. (Rewrite Rules Evaluation Project - Merging Relevant Synthesized Rewrite Rules #6174)
• The ARM backend now supports native 16-bit float instructions (Float16 support in CodeGen_ARM #6102)
• Division by non-power-of-two unsigned constants is now faster on X86 (Add a new unsigned division method #6322)
• The WebAssembly backend is mature enough for significant production use (See https://web.dev/ps-on-the-web/)

Build

• Fixed an issue with add_halide_library on Xcode, which requires at least one source file for every target. (Fix Xcode issue that requires at least one source file when building a library from objects. #6175)
• Added a watchdog timer to the Halide generator executables (i.e. GenGen.cpp). (Add a watchdog timer to Generator #6184, Join generator watchdog timer if exception thrown #6240)
• Fixed a missing dependency on Threads::Threads in CMake (Usage of C++ <thread> header requires linking to threading library #6257)
• The tutorials and readmes are now packaged to the doc dir. The documentation has been moved one level deeper to share/Halide/doc/html (CMake: install docs into halide subdirectory of doc dir #6267)

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This discussion was created from the release Halide 13.0.0.

[abadams]

I edited the above to remove mention of compute capability 8.6, which didn't quite make the release commit. If someone needs it we can backport.