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Rootbeer GPU Compiler Lets Almost Any Java Code Run On the GPU

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Re: Rootbeer GPU Compiler Lets Almost Any Java Code Run On the GPU

#61

Post by michaelcampbell »

yason wrote: post #50
DrJokepu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. It's about trade-offs. Some languages are designed to be lightweight and require minimal assistance from the IDE. Some languages are optimised for very large codebases and expect a lot of "ceremony and plumbing" around them. And then there are, of course, millions of shades between the two extremes. Java and C# are in the second group. These are all very useful tools when used for the right purposes. (Also I hav…

Java pretty much created the concept of a modern IDE where the editor knows about the libraries and does boilerplate expansion for you. This wasn't generally needed before the age of Java.

Is not smalltalk's "IDE" so, so much more all-knowing than any java one?

Re: Rootbeer GPU Compiler Lets Almost Any Java Code Run On the GPU

#62

Post by pi18n »

hnriot wrote: post #57
archangel_one wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a problem with a language if it requires heavyweight environments to make aspects of writing code in it acceptable.

Is this really a concern? It's like blaming C for needing an editor, what's the big deal about using an IDE for some languages. It makes you more productive and they are not heavyweight by modern laptop standards. And even without an IDE, it's hardly that difficult to use namespaces. As has been mentioned here already, they solve a real problem, are necessary, and are much better than not having them. This just seems…

You are assuming the IDE makes everyone more productive. For some people that is absolutely not the case. And the idea that you need to use an IDE for a bunch of boilerplate is abhorrent to them.

It's hard for a Java zealot to understand this position for some reason.

Re: Rootbeer GPU Compiler Lets Almost Any Java Code Run On the GPU

#63

Post by markokocic »

dman wrote: post #54
markokocic wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was the last time any professional software developer was forced to do any real development on someone elses computer? In that case it is likely that one will miss his keyboard, desktop shortcuts, shell aliases, browser bookmarks much more than tour ide.

So you have never been asked for help from a junior developer whose development setup is different than yours?

Help in this context means discussion, advice, him showing me what he had done, me suggesting quick solution, or talking to him what to type, similar to pair programming. If _I_ had to actually write more than few lines of code, we'd just switch to my computer.

Re: Rootbeer GPU Compiler Lets Almost Any Java Code Run On the GPU

#64

Post by Deinumite »

raverbashing wrote: post #55
yason wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java pretty much created the concept of a modern IDE where the editor knows about the libraries and does boilerplate expansion for you. This wasn't generally needed before the age of Java.

Java also invented extreme overengineering of libraries, making it a need to have syntax completion for even trivial tasks Probably doing socket programming in C is easier than in Java (to be fair, it wasn't Java really, it was "OO evangelists" most likely, starting with C++ then going crazy with Java. Too bad they didn't even touch smalltalk

> Probably doing socket programming in C is easier than in Java

Actually... networked programming is really easy in Java.

You are right though the state of a lot of java libs is hilarious! Smalltalk seems really cool but I've never had a reason to devote time to it.

Re: Rootbeer GPU Compiler Lets Almost Any Java Code Run On the GPU

#65

Post by chc »

archangel_one wrote: post #21
mintplant wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not a problem when IDEs like Eclipse and Netbeans automatically handle imports for you.

It's a problem with a language if it requires heavyweight environments to make aspects of writing code in it acceptable.

Is that why Lisps are so poorly thought of? They're designed around the idea of having a whole REPL all the time.

Re: Rootbeer GPU Compiler Lets Almost Any Java Code Run On the GPU

#67

Post by _3u10 »

wmf wrote: post #7

I wonder if this is as big a win as it sounds. Regardless of what language you're using, you have to "think GPU" to get any performance from GPUs. The additional overhead of using CUDA/OpenCL syntax seems pretty small in comparison.

Probably not, typical java code is dominated by branching indirect code. Such code typically operates on mutable data which is not what GPUs are designed to do efficiently.

This should be a performance nightmare.

Re: Rootbeer GPU Compiler Lets Almost Any Java Code Run On the GPU

#68

Post by AlisdairO »

pi18n wrote: post #62
hnriot wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really a concern? It's like blaming C for needing an editor, what's the big deal about using an IDE for some languages. It makes you more productive and they are not heavyweight by modern laptop standards. And even without an IDE, it's hardly that difficult to use namespaces. As has been mentioned here already, they solve a real problem, are necessary, and are much better than not having them. This just seems…

You are assuming the IDE makes everyone more productive. For some people that is absolutely not the case. And the idea that you need to use an IDE for a bunch of boilerplate is abhorrent to them. It's hard for a Java zealot to understand this position for some reason.

It's pretty hard to imagine an IDE not making a Java programmer more productive. The difference is truly astounding.

Re: Rootbeer GPU Compiler Lets Almost Any Java Code Run On the GPU

#69

Post by rbanffy »

jbooth wrote: post #51
rbanffy wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After a while, most Java developers start thinking it's ok to build deep hierarchies of modules.

Complaining about java as a language for providing a namespace feature that's basically identical to every other language just shows a want to hate on Java.

It's OK to build hierarchies of modules. It's not OK to make them deeper than needed and violate YAGNI with sparse hierarchies prepared for situations that'll never arise. Not all programmers fall into this trap, but due to IDE support, Java developers are specially vulnerable because, for them, it costs nothing - programs do the job of keeping everything neatly over-organized.

I don't hate Java. In fact, along with Python and C, it's one of my favorite (and more used) languages. But I do realize it has a huge potential for being abused in horrible ways.

Re: Rootbeer GPU Compiler Lets Almost Any Java Code Run On the GPU

#70

Post by joestringer »

stephen272 wrote: post #5

Seems much nicer than coding directly for CUDA or OpenCL

The host-side application could already be written using Java, atleast for OpenCL applications[1] (The kernel--that is, the GPU code--was still written in OpenCL). My only concern is that Java will make it more difficult to find out exactly what's going on in the kernel code, and hence more difficult to optimise.

Now, this also doesn't solve the issue of needing to consider the parallel architecture when coding the kernel to actually make use of the hardware. Nevertheless, kudos to the guys behind this.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/javacl/

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