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Comment by MobiusHorizons | Hacker News Reader

From the readme:

> Note: This project is still heavily in development and is at an early stage.

> Compiling and running simple shaders works, and a significant portion of the core library also compiles.

> However, many things aren't implemented yet. That means that while being technically usable, this project is not yet production-ready.

Also projects like rust gpu are built on top of projects like cuda and ROCm they aren’t alternatives they are abstractions overtop

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I think Rust GPU is built on top of Vulkan + SPIR-V as their main foundation, not on top of CUDA or ROCm.

What I meant more is the language of writing GPU programs themselves, not necessarily the machinery right below it. Vulkan is good to advance for that.

I.e. CUDA and ROCm focus on C++ dialect as GPU language. Rust GPU does that with Rust and also relies on Vulkan without tying it to any specific GPU type.

The article mentions Triton for this purpose. I don’t think you will get maxed out performance on the hardware though because abstraction layers won’t let you access the fastest possible path.

> I don’t think you will get maxed out performance on the hardware though because abstraction layers won’t let you access the fastest possible path.

You could argue about CPU architectures the same, no? Yet compilers solve this pretty well most of the time.

Sort of not really. Compilers are fantastic for the typical stuff and that includes the compilers in the CUDA/ROCm/Vulkan/etc stacks. But on the CPU for the rare critical bits where you care about every last cycle or other inane details for whatever reason you're often all but forced to fall back on intrinsics and microarch specific code paths.

Yeah, that's why I said most of the time. Sometimes even for CPUs things need assembly. But no one stops you using GPU assembly either when needed I suppose? It should not be the default approach probably.

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