Ask HN: C++ still dominates on GPUs, why not Rust?

11 pointsAmbix2y ago2 comments

From what I know, modern GPUs are still programmed with C++ exclusively. See CUDA [0] for Nvidia and ROCm [1] for AMD.

Why is this? Why Rust is not loved there?

[0] https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/

[1] https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP

2 comments

thesuperbigfrog2y ago

>> Why is this? Why Rust is not loved there?

History and demand.

CUDA is about 15 years old. MPI and similar parallel computing APIs are even older.

C, C++, and Fortran have been the "goto" programming languages for parallel and scientific computing for decades.

Rust is a relative newcomer that does not have enough demand yet to mandate CUDA APIs. It probably will some day.

Another concern is the number of decades-mature libraries that are used in parallel computing domains. It seems much more likely that any Rust support will initially be Rust wrappers around C or C++ APIs rather than native Rust implementations.

Some projects for Rust on CUDA are in progress:

https://github.com/Rust-GPU/Rust-CUDA

https://github.com/bheisler/RustaCUDA

ActorNightly2y ago

GPU programming =/= CPU programming. GPUs don't have complex execution paths with branching, and the programs that run are "memory safe" in the sense of what Rust aims to improve.

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