[swift-evolution] Swift-based Metal Shading Language

[G B]

I would very much like to see this.  Perhaps not Metal per se, but the ability to compile code to a heterogenous architecture.

I’ve been mulling two sets of ideas that might be steps in that direction:

— making the simd.h types (double4, float2, etc) first class types in Swift
— introducing the concept of purely functional (or some other suitably constrained) closures that could be easily complied to parallel/vectorized architectures

I’d love to get to a point where GCD could handle GPU/SIMD/CPU execution without needing a whole separate language— even if only for a subset of applications.  It seems like Swift has been laying a lot of the ground work to move in that direction.





> On Jul 9, 2016, at 09:59 , Georgios Moschovitis via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> I am wondering if there are any plans to introduce a Swift-based Metal Shading Language in the future to replace (or be available along) the current c++-based language.
> 
> It would be great to use Swift for GPU-accelerated data-parallel tasks (e.g. ML).
> 
> Any thoughts?
> -g.
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