Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust

That's actually a magnificent observation. This is not only an indication of a keen eye, but a trained brilliant mind as well.

> even Nvidia

Why "even Nvidia"?

They are fully behind using AI for basically everything.

What's next? "Damn, even McDonald's is putting out unhealthy food"

What are we for, I ask? What the hell are we now. Chatters to LLMs now? Is this our future? It really is starting to feel like it now.

I get the impression that Nvidia employees don't care too much - I started seeing fully AI-written "documentation" on some of their smaller projects more than a year ago (i.e., before it was even slightly a good idea).

I hadn't read the article and read this comment as though NVIDIA themselves were implying that this library was checked but not trusted by them since it was fully LLM generated.

not to worry, they have an 'AI generated summary' box too

Thanks, saved me a few minutes

Claude, rewrite my graphics card in Rust. Make no mistakes.

Is that your honest load bearing assessment you’re going to flag?

Nobody cares if kernels are written in Rust. Kernels were meant to be written in C, but if you want to go more high-level try Triton or a similar DSL that nicely abstract tile sizes etc.

Launching kernels manually is an error prone PITA which I believe is the principle reason for CUDA's popularity. Having the compiler give an error when you mess up is a huge benefit. But having the compiler allow you to express "I want to launch this kernel over a grid with these dimensions, with these arguments" as a single expression is where the vast majority of the value comes from.

The having it all in a single file is mostly an artefact of the fact that it is C++, because C++ is single file at a time compilation. In D (which is multiple files in a single compiler invocation) with DCompute (which targets CUDA and OpenCL with upcoming support for Vulkan and Metal), you are required to write the kernels in a separate module, but you get all the benefits of the compiler complaining when you mess up _and_ the expressivity of "launch me this kernel".

> I strongly dislike CUDA. Once you have allowed that proprietary cr*p

Genuine question...why not just type "crap"? It's not even that much of a curse, but I've never really understood the point of self-censorship. If you don't want to curse then you could just use a non-curse word.

> Once you have allowed that proprietary cr*p into your C++ codebase

People have been doing that all the time for every kind of codebase. It's just part of the business. I don't see how it's worth having any emotions or opinions about it. Seems like you are wasting your energy.

Are win32 APIs proprietary? So you decide to use them, use a wrapper/UI framework, or don't develop for Windows. Easy choice.

Developing for embedded devices? So you read the manufacturers manual and implement based on the spec, use some sort of HAL if they are available, or you don't have a job. Even simpler.

> The best way to program GPUs is face up to the reality that they are not the same machine as the CPU, write your kernels in separate files, and launch them manually

Isn't that how CUDA code is normally written?

You could also use Mojo, one language for all targets.

yeah, just write a stub/wrapper around it and abstract. it's the classic coupling problem. nothing to do with CUDA

Is this satire? D3D12 and Metal aren't any less proprietary than CUDA.

LLM don't need to be trained in a library to use it well. It's just Rust which they know well.

And what prevent you exactly ?

There were humans far superior than you for writting Rust before LLM, now there's a LLM. The only difference is price and time execution.

You get an awesome teacher (LLM) ready to answer all your questions about Rust.

And you still find excuses not to learn it ?

At some point, just realize you've been lazy to learn it and LLMs are just an excuse.

cudarc been great for me, because it's easy to look up existing examples and references, and it maps 1-to-1 with what I see. I'm already having a tough time with CUDA itself, a dialect of it makes a tad harder to rely on previous work.

Seems more ergonomic in general though, both approaches they share, compared to cudarc, and less build infrastructure and fiddling with environments, which is great.

Rust just makes you sign a waiver first.