[cfe-dev] OpenCL C

[Renato Golin]

On 17 December 2013 15:16, Pekka Jääskeläinen <pekka.jaaskelainen at tut.fi>wrote:

> AFAIK Clover, like pocl, uses (or at least tries to) the upstream Clang
> for an OpenCL C frontend. There are not many unimplemented features of
> the OpenCL 1.2 language in Clang that I know of anymore.


Hi Pekka,

Genuine question: why are there two (more?) variants using LLVM?

I may be wrong, but I think this would be a major milestone to get the
"approved technology" stamp.


I'm afraid I'm still too novice with the Clang internals to
> be competent for this task. I hoped SomeOneElse(tm) raised his/her
> hand to take this job :P I can promise to do my best in reviewing
> any patches though.
>

That's great! Other things involve monitoring the mailing list for "opencl"
(with a filter, mark as important, etc), so that you respond to queries,
open bugs, find out more information, copy yourself to all bugs, make sure
they progress, etc. You don't need to be the code owner to do any of that.


In any case, I do not understand why OpenCL C is treated as a kind of
> a 2nd class language in Clang now, at least I get that feeling of it.
>

There are no guarantees that it will work on every release.

The ARM back-end used to be second-class because even though there were
some buildbots, they would randomly fail, the test-suite wasn't passing and
not many people outside Apple would add code to it.

Since a few years ago, ARM got interest, and this year Linaro, Qualcomm and
others joined the crew and we have this amazing group of developers adding
features and fixing bugs, we have lots of buildbots and the test-suite
passes green every time, and every release we bootstrap, test, benchmark,
and make binary releases. It's a lot of work to be able to stamp
"first-class" on something, but it's worth it.

As long as all OpenCL parties hide behind proprietary curtains, this
integration will never happen, and it'd be hard to say OpenCL is
first-class. I don't think they will come, but there could be a large
enough community around it in the open, which will eventually make it
first-class, and drive OpenCL users into the open. But you have to do that
from the outside.

cheers,
--renato
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