The Howdy Glossary

Halide is an open-source programming language designed for image processing. It lets developers write high-performance code without sacrificing productivity or portability. Halide decouples the algorithm's definition from its execution, allowing for optimized routines across different hardware targets, including CPUs, GPUs, and specialized image processing units. The syntax is concise thanks to features like implicit loop fusion and scheduling primitives that expose parallelism at a high level of abstraction. This optimization process occurs ahead of runtime through an auto-tuning feature which tests various implementations for performance on the target machine in order to select the best one automatically. Developed by researchers at MIT CSAIL and Harvard University, Halide has been used in industry applications such as Google Chrome's JPEG encoder, Adobe's Lightroom mobile app, and game engines like Unity.