TALC: A Simple C Language Extension For Improved Performance and Code Maintainability

In this paper, we present TALC -a small language extension for C and C++ suitable for applications that traverse common data structures such as large meshes or cubes. We make three contributions in this paper. First, we motivate the need for a new C/C++ extension focused on addressing emerging problem areas in performance and code maintainability. Second, we define the language extension and illustrate how it is employed in C. Third, we show the utility of such an extension by providing comparison code snippets that demonstrate advantages in both software maintainability and performance. Performance benefits of the extension are provided for several experiments resulting in up to 200% speedups over more conventional methods to achieve the same algorithm.