Halide 12.0.0

We are pleased to announce the release of Halide 12.0.0!

This is mostly a quality of life and bugfix release to set the stage for larger changes in Halide 13 (which will require C++17).

You can download one of our binary releases here, or check one of the following package repositories:

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

Language and Compiler

• Added align_extent scheduling directive #5829
• Added TailStrategy::Predicate as an alternative to TailStrategy::GuardWithIf to use predicated loops unconditionally #5856
• Added scatter() and gather() expressions to support reading from and writing to multiple locations in update definitions #5553
• Added internal memoization to Adams2019 autoscheduler (performance improvement) #5697 #5654
• Removed old-style realize() methods which had been deprecated #5676
• Removed deprecated scheduling directive overloads #5656
• Many simplifier and bounds inference improvements and bugfixes #5615 #5618 #5895 #6002

Backends

• Added support for AVX512 VNNI instructions #5725 #5807
• Removed OpenGL/GLSL backend #5626
• Fixed various errors with large_buffers #5716 #5940
• Improved support for sdot and udot instructions on ARM (where supported) #5954
• Improved support for WebAssembly SIMD ops, when compiling with LLVM 13 #5849 #5850 #5853 #5854 #5861 #5863
• PyStub generators must now choose to use either only positional arguments or only keyword arguments. This is an ABI break #5761

Build

• Added scripts to create Ubuntu packages #5754 #5967
• Added experimental support for ClangCL on Windows #5876
• Added support and pre-built binaries for macOS ARM64
• Halide headers no longer inject stack space linker flags on Windows; now, the compiler runs on a fiber with enough stack space #5873
• Halide shared library no longer exposes LLVM symbols on macOS and Linux. Help wanted for Windows! #5659