GPU/CPU roadmaps

[Jeremie Pelletier]

language_fan Wrote:

> Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:37:46 -0400, Jeremie Pelletier thusly wrote:
> 
> > I wouldn't be surprised to see major games releases built in D in a few
> > years.
> 
> It's quite optimistic to think that the toolchain will be usable and 
> robust enough on the large scale in a few years. For instance adding the 
> keywords immutable, const, and pure will not magically turn D into the 
> state of the art research language in the category of pure functional 
> languages.

Yeah it's optimistic, but not unrealistic. Most of the concepts talked about in the presentation are covered on Bartosz's blog, which I've been reading with much interest in the past days, and will most likely end up in D sooner or later.

>From what I read of the presentation, functional programming is only a quarter of his framework concept (dealing with physics and the likes), there is still STM for game state, good old sequencial programming to talk to the hardware, and then highly parallel vector processing.

For the moment libraries like OpenCL could be used to provide the vector processing, and STM only requires a software implementation, it doesn't have to be part of the language, because we don't want it everywhere (that 30% performance overhead is scary).

As for the masses of libraries already available in C++, they can all be ported to D, with less code, and performing more efficiently. 3rd party middleware usually have a C API so its not a problem either.

Thats the beauty of abstractions, if we abstract OpenCL now for vector processing, we can just replace this module in the future to use intel's larrabee and all the code using the interface wouldn't see the difference.

So yeah, I'm optimistic, because I know its something we can start designing right away, and thinking about things like that is exactly why I love programming so much.