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Re: GCC & OpenCL ?


On Feb 3, 2009, at 8:48 AM, Mark Mitchell wrote:

Andrey Belevantsev wrote:

Obviously, a library is not enough for a heterogeneous system, or
am I missing anything from your description? As I know, e.g. there is
no device-independent bytecode in the OpenCL standard which such a
backend could generate. 

That's correct.  I was envisioning a proper compiler that would take
OpenCL input and generate binary output, for a particular target, just
as with all other GCC input languages.  That target might be a GPU, or
it might be a multi-core CPU, or it might be a single-core CPU.

Of course, OpenCL also specifies some library functionality; that could
be provided in a library that included hand-written assembly code, or
was generated by some non-GCC tool.

That's an interesting and very reasonable approach to start with. However, realize that while this will give you ability to run programs that use some of the OpenCL language extensions, you won't be able to run any real OpenCL apps. The OpenCL programming model fundamentally requires runtime compilation and the kernel-manipulation library APIs are a key part of that.

-Chris

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