Programming in general is about converting something you understand into something a computer understands, and making sure the computer can execute it fast enough.

This is already hard enough as it is, but GPU programming (at least in its current state) is an order of magnitude worse in my experience. Tons of ways to get tripped up, endless trivial/arbitrary things you need to know or do, a seemingly bottomless pit of abstraction that contains countless bugs or performance pitfalls, hardware disparity, software/platform disparity, etc. Oh right, and a near complete lack of tooling for debugging. What little tooling there is only ever works on one GPU backend, or one OS, or one software stack.

I’m no means an expert but I feel our GPU programming “developer experience” standards are woefully out of touch and the community seems happy to keep it that way.

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anikom15 2 hours ago | parent [-]

OpenGL and pre-12 DirectX were the attempt at unifying video programming in an abstract way. It turned out that trying to abstract away what the low-level hardware was doing was more harmful than beneficial.

	▲	namuol 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> It turned out that trying to abstract away what the low-level hardware was doing was more harmful than beneficial. Abstraction isn’t inherently problematic, but the _wrong_ abstraction is. Just because abstraction is hard to do well, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Just because abstraction gets in the way of certain applications, doesn’t mean it’s not useful in others. Not to say nobody is trying, but there’s a bit of a catch-22 where those most qualified to do something about it don’t see a problem with the status quo. This sort of thing happens in many technical fields, but I just have to pick on GPU programming because I’ve felt this pain for decades now and it hasn’t really budged. Part of the problem is probably that the applications for GPUs have broadened and changed dramatically in the last decade or so, so it’s understandable that this moves slowly. I just want more people on the inside to acknowledge the problem.