On Sat, 07 Apr 2012 11:38:15 -0500, Josh Klontz <josh.klo...@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.
