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Comment by dllu

12 hours ago

Since NVIDIA owns huggingface now and huggingface has the excellent Candle [1] crate for inference on Rust, this seems like a good step towards nice native Rust kernels.

[1] https://github.com/huggingface/candle

Nobody cares if kernels are written in Rust. Kernels were meant to be written in C, but if you want to go more high-level try Triton or a similar DSL that nicely abstract tile sizes etc.

  • kernels aren't meant to be written by any defined language. C is just a traditionally good default language that took over from assembly. No particular reason we have to stick with C.

  • That is exactly why OpenCL failed adoption, focusing on C, instead of being polyglot like CUDA.

    • SYCL is the natively polyglot counterpart, with practical implementations of it compiling down to the same sort of SPIR-V kernels as OpenCL. (OTOH, much of the current adoption on the open standards side seems to target the more widely supported SPIR-V compute shaders, via Vulkan compute.)

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  • oh no no no, this is going to break the CPP hold on AI and game dev.

    • Nah, Rust compiler still needs C++ to be built in first place, and everyone on AI uses LLVM as infrastructure.