Emu: Language for Programming GPUs in Rust

by adamnemecek • 7 years ago

122 30 7 years ago

pitaj2• 7 years ago

I have several questions:

1. What exact syntactic differences does this have from rust, and why?

Some differences I see are in function definitions: lack of `fn` keyword, `->` for function return type, and colons for parameter types.

2. How does this make use of the borrow-checker, if at all?

3. Who is the target audience? Is it meant for general mathematical acceleration or graphics?

It seems to be meant for scientific purposes, seeing as it provides a system of units and constants.

fluffything• 7 years ago

AFAICT this does not really use Rust, or the Rust type system at all.

This is just a procedural macro that parses "Rust-like" syntax into an AST, and then 1:1 fold that AST into OpenCL. This AST is not type checked, and if you were to, for example, replace the usage of an `u32` in there with a `type U32 = u32;` then parsing will probably fail, because the proc macro doesn't know what `U32` means.

The OpenCL code that gets dumped into a byte string, is compiled at run-time by your graphics driver. The proc macro can probably, at best, try to verify that it is correct at compile-time, by passing the dump to some OpenCL verification tool, but it does not appear to be doing that right now.

rjeli• 7 years ago

It seems the purpose of rust would be to use the borrow checker for safe compilation, but this is all in a macro? So the value add of rust here is the good macro system?

ajkjk• 7 years ago

Well, there's the value add in not having to touch C++...

fulafel2• 7 years ago

Indeed. Though there are also other contenders (eg Futhark) in the sane GPU languages competition.

pjmlp• 7 years ago

Depends, as NVidia nowadays designs their GPGPUs for C++ as source language.

"CppCon 2017: Olivier Giroux Designing (New) C++ Hardware"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86seb-iZCnI

lightgreen• 7 years ago

I think it is designed to embed OpenCL easily into Rust, not as standalone tool or embed it into other languages.

gitgud• 7 years ago

A bit off-topic, but it seems articles with "in Rust" or "in Go" tacked on the end are consistently upvoted to the front-page. I wonder how well this reflects actual usage of the languages Rust and Go...

kbenson• 7 years ago

The front page isn't an indicator of usage, it's an indicator of interest, and specifically the interest of the type of people that read HN. I don't think it's a stretch to say that Rust seems to have garnered the interest of a lot of those types of people, whether or not they are currently using it.

unnouinceput4• 7 years ago

It doesn't. As a freelancer if I type "rust" on upwork right now I get only 26 jobs. If I type "golang" it yelds 104 jobs. But if I type "php" I get 7966 jobs; "java" = 2547 jobs; C# = 1174 jobs. Even "Assembler" gives 292 results, more then double of both rust + golang combined. For me Rust / Golang / Swift are those Instagram "influencers" that the press talk a lot about it but have little power in the harsh reality of the world.

adamnemecek3• 7 years ago

They've been around for a much shorter period of time. Also, maybe upwork skews toward a different type of jobs.

StreamBright• 7 years ago

And? Upwork's and HN's crowd are not similar in the statistics sense, the vast majority of Upwork users are not necessarily on HN. On top of that, Upworks's numbers represent the business requirements of enterprises, also has nothing to do what software engineers like.

jaabe• 7 years ago

If actual usage reflected front page position we’d all be talking about C, C#, JAVA or PHP.

I follow a few job agents because I do part time work as an examiner for applied CS students, and I occasionally advice on what languages they should teach to make sure their students are job ready, and nothing has really changed for a decade. Python demand is really the only area that has seen a real increase, but not for developers as you need some sort of degree in either statistics or math to get the ML/BI jobs.

It’s always a little sad to see students who spend a lot of time buying into the hype and building their final projects in something like Rust or Go and before that node/express. Because they’ll have a much harder time finding a job than the ones who didn’t do that. Not because learning Rust is bad, but because it’s safer (and cheaper) to chose their competition and it’s not like there is really a lack of freshly educated developers anymore.

atoav• 7 years ago

I program Rust, I sometimes work on projects that benefit from GPU acceleration.

The in Rust in the title therefore catches my eye because it could solve some of my problems, depending on how it is implemented.

kilon• 7 years ago

Rust is very unpopular. Popular being besides the usual suspects Assembly, Visual Basic, Delphi, Objective C , Swift etc. Finding the popularity of a language is actually pretty easy, ignore all the blog posts and opinion pieces of any kind and focus on third party libraries availability, documentation and benchmarks. Even on benchmarks Rust score very low making its “as fast as C” claim speculative to say the least. Strictness of a Rust also makes it highly unlikely that the language will become popular any time soon. Judging from the fact that innovation of any kind is one big reason for users to stay as far away as possible, even if that innovation ends up being part of all programming languages out there. Explains why innovation has stagnate the last century in software. So my rule of thumb is “if many people talk about it then most likely it’s popular if a ton of people talk about then it’s most likely unpopular”. So it’s definetly an indicator in a bell like curve.

johncolanduoni• 7 years ago

If you mean unpopular in the sense that it’s unlikely it would end up being used for your “average” project I think you’re right. However it’s seeing uptake in key systems programming projects. The most notable is probably Amazon’s Firecracker VMM that underlies AWS Lambda and Fargate. Google is also writing some components of their new Fuschia OS in it.

carlmr• 7 years ago

Comparing a young language like rust to much older popular languages is not a useful comparison.

I'd say given Rust's age it's popular, and since it is the first contender for a lot of spaces where no other languages have made a serious bid in a while (embedded and real-time systems with higher safety guarantees haven't seen much love since ADA).

It will probably not supplant easy super popular languages like python. But I believe it might find it's niche. A lot of other languages don't have such a USP.

Emu: Language for Programming GPUs in Rust

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