Objective-C D metal binding

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 3/10/23 4:10 PM, ryuukk_ wrote:
> On Friday, 10 March 2023 at 20:53:23 UTC, Hipreme wrote:
>> Hello guys. I have been working for some time into binding Metal to D.
>> This has been quite an interesting journey and today I've reached a 
>> point where it is usable.
>> It is far from complete, but I included a lot of comments from Apple's 
>> documentation, and also have tested and got an entire Metal hello 
>> world working in D.
>>
>> The API I worked on is really nice, I manually put the opIndex, 
>> opIndexAssign, wrapped Objective C Runtime Arrays to a strongly typed 
>> array in D. The main point into this binding is getting Metal to run 
>> on Hipreme Engine, so, I don't plan into supporting what I don't use. 
>> That said, I still welcome any contribution to make this a standard 
>> way to program using Apple's Metal.
>>
>> I'll put an example folder the moment I get a dub fix for macOS.
>>
>> ![Metal MacOS D Hello 
>> World](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/10136262/224425800-e417414e-b6be-4e92-93b4-9087b1b281a2.png)
>>
>> https://code.dlang.org/packages/d-metal-binding
> 
> Congrats!
> 
> But metal obj-c? do you mean DMD support only? so no Apple Silicon 
> (intel only)?
> 
> I don't think Intel stuff on mac ecosystem will be a thing for too long, 
> PPC era already vanished from history
> 
> There is the official C++ headers that you can use to make things easier
> 
> https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/

 From that page:

      No measurable overhead compared to calling Metal Objective-C 
headers, due to inlining of C++ function calls.

D will not inline C++ function calls. So there will be overhead.

Objective-C support is better. Getting Obj-C support into LDC is the 
right path. And I'm with you too -- we need ARM support for Metal. 
Looking forward to it!

-Steve