D and Heterogeneous Computing

[Josh Klontz]

Greetings! As someone with a research interest in software 
abstractions for image processing, the D programming language 
appears to offer unsurpassed language features for constructing 
beautiful and efficient programs. With that said, what would 
really get me to abandon C++ is if D supported a heterogenous 
programming model.

My personal inclination would be something closer to OpenACC than 
anything else I've seen available. Though only in the sense that 
I like the idea of writing code once and being able to 
compile/run/debug it with or without automatic 
vectorization/kernelization. Presumably we could achieve more 
elegant syntax with tighter integration into the language. Has 
anyone been working on anything like this? Is this something the 
community would be interested in seeing? What should the solution 
look like?

One path forward could be a patch to the compiler to generate and 
execute OpenCL kernels for appropriately marked-up D code. While 
I'm new the the D language, I'd be happy to work on a proof of 
concept of this if it is something the community thinks would be 
valuable and I could get specific feedback about the right way to 
approach it.