Comment by charles_irl

Coming from the neural network world, rather than the shader world, but: I'd say you're absolutely right!

Right now NNs and their workloads are changing quickly enough that people tend to prefer runtime optimization (like the dynamic/JIT compilation provided by Torch's compiler), but when you're confident you understand the workload and have the know-how, you can do static compilation (e.g. with ONNX, TensorRT).

I work on a serverless infrastructure product that gets used for NN inference on GPUs, so we're very interested in ways to amortize as much of that compilation and configuration work as possible. Maybe someday we'll even have something like what Redshift has in their query engine -- pre-compiled binaries cached across users.