Okay, so, GPUs are taking one more step towards being general purpose massively parallel machines. That's cool. What would be even cooler though would be for GPU vendors to start giving us the user manual. An I mean the real user manual, that explains how to use their piece of metal when all you have is that piece of metal . That means a precise description of the wire protocols, the data format of the buffers we sen…
Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
351–360 of 371 posts
Re: Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
#352I think it would be much nicer, although unrealistic at the moment given the number of combinations of GPU vendors and variety of hardware, to directly target the underneath GPU ISA machine code. Since I can write a simple compiler to target x64 machine code, it should be possible to write one to target my GPU. Though, I'm certain that vendor lock is probably more profitable for them.
My thoughts on this, as a person who has recently coming around to working in this space is that up to now the convenience and "simplicity" of working in CUDA as it is has been a giant moat for NVIDIA. Having a whole toolchain with a C++ dialect and a giant extant pile of code out there that looked familiar to people meant they've "won" the AI wars.
And in that context NVIDIA had every motivation to keep their SDK somewhat abstracted higher up the chain and fully under their control and then be free to innovate in the lower bits. And this served them well as well as their customers.
My sense is that now with agent driven development this is basically evaporating. Agents are capable of at least prototyping/writing kernels for any hardware and ISA. e.g. OpenAI built their own custom hardware and ISA for it and then set agents loose on it writing kernels and claims great success. At least they're claiming this. And from my own experiences as a n00b entering this space, I can believe it.
TLDR I don't think vendor lock on the software side is going to work out for them as a strategy.
But luckily for them they continue to have really good hardware and good access to semiconductor fabrication. But just look at HotChips 2026 a couple weeks ago and look at the huge variety of new inference hardware coming down the pipe which looks completely unlike NVIDIA/CUDA.
Re: Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think those filters are even real, I think it's just mass-hysteria. I call these kinds of behaviours "traditions", but I'm not sure if there's a better term for it. Basically someone comes up with something which is nonsensical, but plausible. Like believing that their videos are unpopular because they said the word "rape" and the algorithm magically got them, rather than because their videos suck. Then someo…
> I call these kinds of behaviours "traditions", but I'm not sure if there's a better term for it. In psychology that kind of thing is referred to as "superstition". More specifically, "superstition" in this sense refers to the phenomenon of copying someone else's successful approach to a problem you have. (In your example, getting views on youtube.) Since you don't know what parts of their approach matter, you copy…
I always associated the term “cargo culting” with that but I think that term has largely fallen out of fashion (probably for the best).
Re: Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Platform may retroactively make up and enforce rules that makes your content violate terms (and remove them) See YouTube.
I certainly dislike how everyone on YouTube is saying “SA” and “unalive” and “corn”. It’s one thing if it’s some funny commentary channel avoiding those words, but what bothers me is the true crime YouTubers. In the subject of true crime, rape and murder are just things that are probably going to come up, and when they refuse to use the appropriate language, it comes off as infantilizing, which is weird considering t…
A (baseless) hypothesis: perhaps there are plenty of YouTube creators who use the proper, mature terminology but you never see their videos because the algorithm really is penalizing them for it...
Re: Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
#355Since NVIDIA owns huggingface now and huggingface has the excellent Candle [1] crate for inference on Rust, this seems like a good step towards nice native Rust kernels. [1] https://github.com/huggingface/candle
I will give you an outsider's perspective on an analogy in this case. It is easy to see Candle as a ML crate to use for neural networks in rust. I have used it, and it works well. The analogy is Tensorflow 5-10 years ago. It is popular, and there are lots of material on it. You quickly learn from talking to people that due to whims, a collection of reasons, people's love of consensus that no one is recommending it; n…
And to tie this back into GPU programming, Burn's backends use CubeCL, which lets you write compute kernels in a Rust DSL using #[cube], with a JIT compiler and autotuning machinery. It targets CUDA, AMD, Metal, Vulkan and WebGPU.
(disclosure: I am a contributor)
Re: Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
#356Re: Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
#357Does this mean I can write shaders in Rust for use with WGPU or Vulkan?
For compute shaders, you can already do this with CubeCL: https://github.com/tracel-ai/cubecl
You write kernels in a Rust DSL using #[cube], it supports WebGPU through WGSL and Vulkan through SPIR-V, along with CUDA, AMD via ROCm, and Metal. (disclosure: I am a contributor)
Re: Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I strongly dislike CUDA. Once you have allowed that proprietary cr*p Genuine question...why not just type "crap"? It's not even that much of a curse, but I've never really understood the point of self-censorship. If you don't want to curse then you could just use a non-curse word.
Because I know it is not technically crap, a lot of competent people worked on it, most with good intentions. I suppose it is better described as a cleverly designed Trojan horse than can infect your software and make that software become crap, in the sense that it becomes harder to maintain, increases code duplication, messes with your build system, ties your build system to platforms that have their toolchain binar…
The long term benefit is that there are more developers with CUDA experience available to hire than there are with any of the "hard ways" you mention.
Not saying you're wrong, but my career got a lot less frustrating when I started focusing more on the product and less on the ergonomics of the implementation. If you need to build a house and the customer isn't willing to pay for brick, you use vinyl siding.
Re: Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
#359Okay, so, GPUs are taking one more step towards being general purpose massively parallel machines. That's cool. What would be even cooler though would be for GPU vendors to start giving us the user manual. An I mean the real user manual, that explains how to use their piece of metal when all you have is that piece of metal . That means a precise description of the wire protocols, the data format of the buffers we sen…
They don't release it because exposing a stable instruction set would kill their ability to quickly iterate, to release silicon with bugs that can be papered over with software fixes, as fixing bugs in chips is very expensive in terms of time to market, and undoubtedly to charge more for what looks like a hardware feature but actually is a software feature.
It's been this way for 25 years and I don't see it changing.
Re: Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
#360The momentum behind rust seems absolutely unstoppable at the moment, in the light of this, the adoption of Rust into the Linux kernel, and the adoption of for formally verified software by Amazon and Microsoft.
not too long ago, commenters on HN hated Rust and would never use anything written in Rust. So, now that Rust is in Linux, they shouldn't be using Linux either.