On Thursday, 13 January 2022 at 07:23:40 UTC, Bruce Carneal wrote:
> I disagree. D/dcompute can be used as a better general purpose GPU kernel language now (superior meta programming, sane nested functions, ...).
Is dcompute being actively developed or is it in a "frozen" state? longevity is important for adoption, I think.
> There are improvements to be made but, by my lights, dcompute is already better than CUDA in many ways. If we improve usability, make dcompute accessible to "mere mortals", make it a "no big deal" choice instead of a "here be dragons" choice, we'd really have something.
Maybe it would be possible to do something with a more limited scope, but more low level? Like something targeting Metal and Vulkan directly? Something like this might be possible to do well if D would change the focus and build a high level IR.
I think one of Bryce's main points is that there is more long term stability in C++ than in the other APIs for parallel computing, so for long term development it would be better to express parallel code in terms of a C++ standard library construct than other compute-APIs.
That argument makes sense for me, I don't want to deal with CUDA or OpenCL as dependencies. I'd rather have something sit directly on top of the lower level APIs.
> By contrast, I just don't see the C++ crowd getting to sanity/simplicity any time soon... not unless ideas from the circle compiler or similar make their way to mainstream.
It does look a bit complex, but what I find promising for C++ is that Nvidia is pushing their hardware by creating backends for C++ parallel libraries that targets multiple GPUs. That in turn might push Apple to do the same for Metal and so on.
If C++20 had what Bryce presented then I would've considered using it for signal processing. Right now it would make more sense to target Metal/Vulkan directly, but that is time consuming, so I probably won't.