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Comment by not2b | Hacker News Reader

It would suffice for NVIDIA to open-source enough specifications and perhaps some subset of core software to enable others to build high quality open source (or even proprietary) software that targets NVIDIA's architecture. They can't hire every programmer in the world; if other programmers can build high-performance software that takes advantage of their platform, that increases the value of their hardware.

Your comparison to Intel isn't valid: most software that runs on Intel processors isn't built with icc, and customers have a choice: they can use icc, gcc, clang, or a number of other compilers. The NVIDIA world isn't equivalent.

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Anyone is free to target PTX and do their own compiler on top.

In fact, given that it is there since version 3, there are compilers available for almost all major programing languages, including managed ones.

While OpenCL is a C world, and almost no one cares about the C++ extensions and even less vendors care about SPIR-V.

Also the community doesn't seem to be bothered that for a long time, the only SYCL implementation was a commercial one from CodePlay, trying to extend their compilers outside the console market.

> the community doesn't seem to be bothered that for a long time, the only SYCL implementation was a commercial one

Bothered has nothing to do with it. Implementing low level toolchains generally seems to require both a gargantuan effort and an incredible depth of knowledge. If it didn't, I think tooling and languages in general would be significantly better across the board.

What am I supposed to do, implement a SYCL compiler on my own? Forget it - I'll just keep writing GLSL compute shaders or OpenCL kernels until someone with lots of resources is able to foot the initial bill for a fully functional and open source implementation.

Which is why CUDA won, most researchers can't be bothered to keep writing C based shaders with printf debugging.

This is wrong - triSYCL is roughly the same age as ComputeCpp, and hipSYCL is only slightly younger. There has been a lot of academic interest in SYCL, but as with any new technology (especially niche technologies) it's always going to take time to get people on board.

Also, from a quick look at your profile, you seem to have quite a lot of comments criticizing or commenting on CodePlay. Do you have some sort of relationship or animosity with them?

I wish all the luck to CodePlay, the more success the better for them.

They are well appreciated among game developers, given their background.

My problem is how Khronos happens to sell their APIs, and let everyone alone to create their own patched SDKs and then act surprised that commercial APIs end up winning the hearts of the majority.

The situation has hardly changed since I did my thesis with OpenGL in late 90's, porting a particles visualization engine from NeXTSTEP to Windows.

Nothing that compares with CUDA, Metal, DirectX, LibGNMX, NVN tooling.

Hence my reference to CodePlay, as for very long time their SDK was the only productive way to use SYCL.

Khronos likes to oversell the eco-system, and usually the issues and disparities across OEMs tend to be "forgotten" on their marketing materials.

Rust has a PTX backend.

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