[Twinklebear]

ISPC is really awesome, but you're right it is much less known than CUDA/OpenCL. Part of that might just be lack of marketing effort and focus (you don't hear much about it compared to e.g. CUDA) and the team working on it is far smaller than that on CUDA. There has been some wider adoption, like Unreal Engine 4 using it now: https://devmesh.intel.com/projects/intel-ispc-in-unreal-engi... which is super cool, so hopefully we'll see more of that.

As far as support from other languages I did write this wrapper for using ISPC from Rust https://github.com/Twinklebear/ispc-rs (but that's just me again), and there has been work on a WebASM+SIMD backend which is really exciting. Intel does also have an ISPC based texture compressor (https://github.com/GameTechDev/ISPCTextureCompressor) which I think does have some popularity.

However, the domain is pretty specialized, and I think the fraction of people who really care about CPU performance and are willing to port or write part of their code in another language is smaller still. It's also possible that a lot of those who would do so have their own hand written intrinsics wrappers already. Migrating to ISPC would reduce a lot of maintenance effort on such projects, but when they already have momentum in the other direction it can be harder to switch. I think that on the CPU ISPC is easier and better than OpenCL for performance and tight integration with the "host" language, since you can directly share pointers and even call back and forth between the "host" and "kernel".

[fluffy87]

ISPC’s creator Matt Pharr works at NVIDIA, they have a series of blog post explaining the history of ISPC.

[conistonwater]

Link: https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/18/ispc-origins.html