D and Heterogeneous Computing

[Robert Jacques]

On Sat, 07 Apr 2012 11:38:15 -0500, Josh Klontz <josh.klontz at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

I've been using D with CUDA via a high-level wrapper around the driver API. It works very nicely, but it doesn't address the language integration issues. Might I recommend looking into hooking up LDC to the PTX LLVM back-end. That would seem much faster than writing your own back-end.