Comment by transpute

1 year ago

> I don't think either of these languages is practical for real world projects

Maybe not yet, but prior work by this research team eventually lead to CUDA. Terra may be useful as a productivity DSL for some high-performance computations, e.g. listed in their papers:

  our DSL for stencil computations runs 2.3x faster than hand-written C
  our serialization library is 11 times faster than Kryo
  our dynamic assembler is 3–20 times faster than Google’s Chrome assembler

2021 HN thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27334065

> Terra is a workhorse and it gets the job done.. Having first-class code generation capabilities has been really nice, especially with built-in support for things like parsing C header files, vectorization, and CUDA code generation. The language is stable and generally doesn't have many surprises. Unlike, say, C++ or Rust, there aren't as many corners to hide odd behaviors.