I maintain an open source program that uses Eigen. The vast majority of my users do not compile the program, instead downloading a pre-compiled binary from our website. About 80% are on Windows, 10% on Mac and 10% on Linux. I only provide X86 builds, 32 and 64-bit on Windows, 64-bit only on Mac and Linux. We may eliminate the 32-bit Windows build soon.
Historically, I have compiled with no special flags enabling vectorization options for the CPU. I would like to pursue this as I expect it will unlock some nice performance gains. However, I'd like to keep things simple and compatible for users.
What happens when someone runs a program compiled with vectorization when their CPU does not support it? If it fails, how graceful is the failure?
Is there a standard approach to identify the capabilities of a given machine? I could add that to my program and survey users before making a change... Would such code still run on a machine that was in the process of failing due to not having support for the built in vectorization? I.e. if it is crashing, can we send a message as to why we're going down?
Is there a graceful way to support multiple options?
Any tips from other broad use applications is greatly appreciated.