[convolvatron]

that's clearly not a bad thing. however encouraging people to run mutating, procedural code with explicit loops and aliasing maybe isn't the right path to get there. particularly if you just drag forward all the weird old baggage with libc and its horrible string conventions.

I think any programming environment that treats a gpu as a really slow serial cpu isn't really what you want(?)

[quotemstr]

What if it encourages people to write parallel and functional code on CPUs? That'd be a good thing. Influence works both ways.

The bigger problem is that GPUs have various platform features (shared memory, explicit cache residency and invalidation management) that CPUs sadly don't yet. Sure, you could expose these facilities via compiler intrinsics, but then you end up code that might be syntactically valid C but is alien both to CPUs and human minds

[fc417fc802]

> is alien both to CPUs and human minds

On the contrary I would love that. The best case scenario in my mind is being able to express the native paradigms of all relevant platforms while writing a single piece of code that can then be compiled for any number of backends and dynamically retargeted between them at runtime. It would make debugging and just about everything else SO MUCH EASIER.

The equivalent of being able to compile some subset of functions for both ARM and x86 and then being able to dynamically dispatch to either version at runtime, except replace ARM with a list of all the GPU ISAs that you care about.