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12:49:40
Selwyn
I remember watching a presentation on youtube given by drmeister about Clasp which mentioned the possibility of Clasp emitting GPU code via LLVM (and CUDA too I believe)
12:50:20
Selwyn
Has anyone attempted anything like this? I may try something similar and would not like to reinvent the wheel or try to do something which is not actually possible.
12:52:16
Shinmera
Sure you can do that, as long as you don't expect that you'll be able to write common lisp that'll somehow magically run on the gpu
12:56:03
heisig
Selwyn: Shinmera is right - Common Lisp is not so suitable for GPU execution directly (e.g., what should happen when an error is signaled?).
12:56:50
Shinmera
Much more generally: every language needs a runtime. That runtime is not present (and much much harder to make present) on the GPU, so you can't just compile lisp to GPU instructions and think it'll work.
12:57:41
heisig
But using Lisp to write a fancy DSL for GPU computing should work fine, e.g., what Baggers is building with Varjo.
12:58:46
heisig
I hope that one day, Petalisp will also be a viable choice for GPU computing. But I have other things to sort out first.
13:05:47
jackdaniel
and further you go more discouraging it gets for newcomers. that would (jokingly) explain popularity of some bad designed languages.
13:13:10
heisig
Selwyn: Sounds good. Ideally, try to make your DSL portable across CUDA and OpenCL, since CUDA is not a free platform.
13:18:01
Selwyn
The thought of using LLVM as an intermediate representation between the DSL and the code intended to run on the GPU, as opposed to CUDA/OpenCL/GLSL is appealing, but I am not sure whether it would be worth the effort to build such a thing.