[withjive]

> The reason GLSL isn't C is because you can't do everything C does on a low end cellphone GPU - so obviously you have to restrict the language.

GLSL limitations has nothing to do with lowend devices and performance (which now is becoming irrelevant compared to desktops).

But rather GLSL is executed on the GPU— typically across many stream processors— this type of parallelization makes using a general purpose language like C difficult.

I think you need to familiar yourself with some shader programming at least, before you critique the author's domain.

[jwatte]

I think he is familiar. The "you can't do" comment really means "you can't do with good performance." Typical C code would not run fast on a GPU. Indirect data (pointer chasing) has /extreme/ latency penalty!

[AlphaSite]

As I understand it, GPU ISAs expose all of the functionality required to implement arbitrary programs, but the actual shaders compilers don't use it, due to performance concerns.