alt Hacker NewsWait what!? I have been programming CUDA since 2009 and specifically remember it being pushed to C++ as main development language for the first few years, after a brief "CUDA C extension" period.
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suuuuuuuu • last Friday at 1:57 PM
CUDA is not C++. CUDA for GPU kernels is its own language. That's the actual problem requiring new languages or abstractions.
CUDA variants extend several programming languages, including C, C++ and Fortran.
None of the extended languages is the same as the same as the base language, in the same way like OpenMP C++ in not the same as C++ or OpenMP Fortran is not the same as Fortran or SYCL is not the same as C++.
The extended languages include both extensions and restrictions of the base language. In the part of a program that will run on a GPU you can do things that cannot be done in the base language, but there also parts of the base language, e.g. of C++, which are forbidden.
All these extended languages have the advantage that you can write in a single source file a complete multithreaded program, which has parts running concurrently on a CPU and part running concurrently on a GPU, but for the best results you must know the rules that apply to the language accepted by each of them. It is possible to write program that run without modification on either a CPU or a GPU, but this is paid by a lower performance on any of them, because such a program uses only generic language features that work on any of them, instead of taking advantage of specific features.