Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rust running on every GPU

rust-gpu.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 211 posts

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#51

Post by tucnak »

Archit3ch wrote: post #44

I write native audio apps, where every cycle matters. I also need the full compute API instead of graphics shaders. Is the "Rust -> WebGPU -> SPIR-V -> MSL -> Metal" pipeline robust when it come to performance? To me, it seems brittle and hard to reason about all these translation stages. Ditto for "... -> Vulkan -> MoltenVk -> ...". Contrast with "Julia -> Metal", which notably bypasses MSL, and can use native optim…

I must agree that for numerical computation (and downstream optimisation thereof) Julia is much better suited than ostensibly "systems" language such as Rust. Moreover, the compatibility matrix[1] for Rust-CUDA tells a story: there's seemingly very little demand for CUDA programming in Rust, and most parts that people love about CUDA are notably missing. If there was demand, surely it would get more traction, alas, it would appear that actual CUDA programmers have very little appetite for it...

[1]: https://github.com/Rust-GPU/Rust-CUDA/blob/main/guide/src/fe...

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#52

Post by pjmlp »

diabllicseagull wrote: post #9
vouwfietsman wrote: post #3

Certainly impressive that this is possible! However, for my use cases (running on arbitrary client hardware) I generally distrust any abstractions over the GPU api, as the entire point is to leverage the low level details of the gpu. Treating those details as a nuisance leads to bugs and performance loss, because each target is meaningfully different. To overcome this, a similar system should be brought forward by th…

same here. I'm always hesitant to build anything commercial over abstractions, adapter or translation layers that may or may not have sufficient support in the future. sadly in 2025, we are still in desparate need for an open standard that's supported by all vendors and that allows programming for the full feature set of current gpu hardware. the fact that the current situation is the way it is while the company that…

Khronos APIs are the C++ of graphics programming, there is a reason why professional game studios never do political wars on APIs.

Decades of exerience building cross platform game engines since the days of raw assembly programming across heterogeneous computer architectures.

What matters are game design and IP, that they eventually can turn into physical assets like toys, movies, collection assets.

Hardware abstraction layers are done once per platform, can even leave an intern do it, at least the initial hello triangle.

As for who seats as president at Khronos, so are elections on committee driven standards bodies.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#53

Post by tucnak »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #42
kookamamie wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Not sure why it would be better to run Rust on Nvidia GPUs compared to actual CUDA code. I get the idea of added abstraction, but do think it becomes a bit jack-of-all-tradesey.

Because folks like to program in Rust, not CUDA

"Folks" as-in Rust stans, whom know very little about CUDA and what makes it nice in the first place, sure, but is there demand for Rust ports amongst actual CUDA programmers?

I think not.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#54

Post by pjmlp »

rbanffy wrote: post #10
kookamamie wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Not sure why it would be better to run Rust on Nvidia GPUs compared to actual CUDA code. I get the idea of added abstraction, but do think it becomes a bit jack-of-all-tradesey.

I think the idea is to allow developers to write a single implementation and have a portable binary that can run on any kind of hardware. We do that all the time - there are lots of code that chooses optimal code paths depending on runtime environment or which ISA extensions are available.

Without the tooling though.

Commendable effort, however just like people forget languages are ecosystems, they tend to forget APIs are ecosystems as well.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#55

Post by ivanjermakov »

Is it really "Rust" on GPU? Skimming through the code, it looks like shader language within proc macro heavy Rust syntax.

I think GPU programming is different enough to require special care. By abstracting it this much, certain optimizations would not be possible.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#56

Post by brandonpelfrey »

littlestymaar wrote: post #19
kookamamie wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. The performance-purist in me would be very doubtful about the result's optimality, though.

The performance purist don't use Cuda either though (that's why Deepseek used PTX directly). Everything is an abstraction and choosing the right level of abstraction for your usecase is a tradeoff between your engineering capacities and your performance needs.

The issue in my mind is that this doesn’t seem to include any of the critical library functionality specific eg to NVIDIA cards, think reduction operations across threads in a warp and similar. Some of those don’t exist in all hardware architectures. We may get to a point where everything could be written in one language but actually leveraging the hardware correctly still requires a bunch of different implementations, ones for each target architecture.

The fact that different hardware has different features is a good thing.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#57

Post by pjmlp »

ducktective wrote: post #24
chrisldgk wrote: post #11

Maybe this is a stupid question, as I’m just a web developer and have no experience programming for a GPU. Doesn’t WebGPU solve this entire problem by having a single API that’s compatible with every GPU backend? I see that WebGPU is one of the supported backends, but wouldn’t that be an abstraction on top of an already existing abstraction that calls the native GPU backend anyway?

I think WebGPU is a like a minimum common API. Zed editor for Mac has targeted Metal directly. Also, people have different opinions on what "common" should mean. OpenGL vs Vulkan. Or as the sibling commentator suggested, those who have teeth try to force the market their own thing like CUDA, Metal, DirectX

Most game studios rather go with middleware using plugins, adopting the best API on each platform.

Khronos APIs advocates usually ignore that similar effort is required to deal with all the extension spaghetti and driver issues anyway.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#58

Post by ivanjermakov »

thrtythreeforty wrote: post #39
Voultapher wrote: post #34

Let's count abstraction layers: 1. Domain specific Rust code 2. Backend abstracting over the cust, ash and wgpu crates 3. wgpu and co. abstracting over platforms, drivers and APIs 4. Vulkan, OpenGL, DX12 and Metal abstracting over platforms and drivers 5. Drivers abstracting over vendor specific hardware (one could argue there are more layers in here) 6. Hardware That's a lot of hidden complexity, better hope one nev…

Realistically though, a user can only hope to operate at (3) or maybe (4). So not as much of an add. (Abstraction layers do not stop at 6, by the way, they keep going with firmware and microarchitecture implementing what you think of as the instruction set.)

Don't know about you, but I consider 3 levels of abstraction a lot, especially when it comes to such black-boxy tech like GPUs.

I suspect debugging this Rust code is impossible.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#59

Post by dvtkrlbs »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #55

Is it really "Rust" on GPU? Skimming through the code, it looks like shader language within proc macro heavy Rust syntax. I think GPU programming is different enough to require special care. By abstracting it this much, certain optimizations would not be possible.

It is normal rust code compiled to spirv bytecode.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#60

Post by LegNeato »

dvtkrlbs wrote: post #59
ivanjermakov wrote: post #55

Is it really "Rust" on GPU? Skimming through the code, it looks like shader language within proc macro heavy Rust syntax. I think GPU programming is different enough to require special care. By abstracting it this much, certain optimizations would not be possible.

It is normal rust code compiled to spirv bytecode.

And it uses 3rd party deps from crates.io that are completely GPU unaware.
Post reply on HN