D meets GPU: recommendations?

[Bruce Carneal]

On Friday, 29 January 2021 at 20:01:17 UTC, Bruce Carneal wrote:
> On Friday, 29 January 2021 at 17:46:05 UTC, Guillaume Piolat 
> wrote:
>> On Friday, 29 January 2021 at 16:34:25 UTC, Bruce Carneal 
>> wrote:
>>> The project I've been working on for the last few months has 
>>> a compute backend that is currently written MT+SIMD.  I would 
>>> like to bring up a GPU variant.
>>
>> What you could do is ressurect DerelictCL, port it to BindBC, 
>> and write vanilla OpenCL 1.2 + OpenCL C.
>> Not up to date on both, but CUDA is messier than OpenCL.
>>
>> I don't really know about the other possibilities, like OpenGL 
>> + compute shaders or Vulkan + compute shaders.
>
[...]
> I've not looked in to OpenGL compute shaders seriously either 
> but I did look at Vulkan compute shaders.  They looked very 
> strong with respect to future deployability but were weak in 
> other ways so I kept them off the list.  I don't think I can 
> warp my code to fit in to glsl or similar, at least not easily. 
> Custom neighborhood indexing, group/sub-group scheduling 
> control and ability to manage group local memory efficiently 
> were the main concerns, IIRC.

I took another look at Vulkan compute shaders.  They have come a 
long way.  Not nearly as nice as programming in D but good enough 
that I'll sketch out a few kernels if I can't make headway with 
dcompute.

Anybody with recent dcompute experience, please speak up.  The 
code in the repository is pretty nice but it looks unfinished or 
at least frozen in time.