consider also supporting opencl c++

[maddanio]

i know this is brand new, but opencl is going for a c++ superset, like cuda:
https://www.khronos.org/assets/uploads/developers/resources/Intro-to-OpenCL-C++-Whitepaper-May15.pdf
also this will hopefully land in clang soon:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenCL-CXX-Clang-Interest
would boost::compute be interested in supplying tools for kernel programming, like thrust?

[maddanio]

i.e. library code that can be used inside the kernels themselves

[jszuppe]

OpenCL C++ is not quite like CUDA. It still isn't single source, you can't have a kernel template etc. Major GPU vendors do not support SPIR-V (for OpenCL), thus they do not support OpenCL 2.2 and OpenCL C++ kernel language.

Nonetheless, using OpenCL C++ would solve a lot of our current problems with OpenCL + C++ (ctors, dtors, operator overloading). However, that would require some major changes: refactoring, improving, rewriting algorithms. I don't know if there is someone with free time to do it. Also, a lot of people use (and will use) hardware with support only for OpenCL C, so updated Boost.Compute should still support it.

[jszuppe]

To be honest, before any major update I would wait for OpenCL Next with feature sets.

[maddanio]

sure, not talking about rushing things at all. just thought when c++ comes to kernels, boost should be there too, with kernel specific tools. did not know that spir-v support is slow. but even clang support ist still in the coming, so yeah, its early, but exciting :)

[jszuppe]

If you want to have something like Thrust (single source), we would have to add SYCL backend.