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by SubjectToChange 947 days ago
This is one area where I imagine C++ wannabe replacements like Rust having a very hard time taking over.

I 100% agree. Although I have a keen interest in Rust I can’t see it offering any unique value to the GPGPU or HPC space. Meanwhile C++ is gaining all sorts of support for HPC. For instance the parallel stl algorithms, mdspan, std::simd, std::blas, executors (eventually), etc. Not to mention all of the development work happening outside of the ISO standard, e.g. CUDA/ROCm(HIP)/OpenACC/OpenCL/OpenMP/SYCL/Kokkos/RAJA and who knows what else.

C++ is going to be sitting tight in compute for a long time to come.

1 comments

There is always the argument that it can help reduce the errors produced due to memory corruption.

However industry standards matter more.

HPC researchers already employ some techniques to detect memory corruption, hardware flaws, floating point errors, and so on. Maybe Rust could meaningfully reduce memory errors, but if it comes at the cost of bounds checking (or any other meaningful runtime overhead) they will have absolutely zero interest.
Chapel and Julia ongoing efforts proves otherwise, and I can tell from CERN days, not everyone uses those tools.

In any case, that means those languages are much better positioned than Rust in such ecosystem.