On Saturday, 11 March 2023 at 13:08:49 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
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.
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.
If you are able to use LTO then they'll be inlined. This may be
slightly easier said that done for some build targets because
apple's "clang" is actually a closed source fork so it's not
impossible that there is LLVM incompatibility in there somewhere.
In the absence of evidence suggesting otherwise, the overhead of
an additional function call is probably quite small relative to
the metal part of the function call (especially if that Metal
call ends up waiting on the GPU for something).
I'm now curious if there are I$ optimizations specifically for
chasing function calls like this.
