Re: [swarm-hackers] Swarm on MacOS 10.6 Snow Leopard

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Scott Christley wrote:
> I heard Nvidia has released OpenCL for linux to its developers, not 
> sure when a public release will happen though, nor whether it will be 
> as tightly integrated as the Apple solution.
I haven't used it much, but NVIDIA was first to get the `passed' status 
from Khronos.  My impression is that NVIDIA has done the most with 
performance tuning of certain apps, whereas Apple is the most feature 
complete (i.e. optional features like OpenGL integration for textures 
actually work). 
> The on-the-fly compilation can produce CPU code too right?  Do you 
> know how it handles the name space?  If you compile a function with an 
> existing name, does it just fail or does it replace?
I know you can reference libc routines with the CPU version, at least on 
Apple.  Still, I think the namespace for the kernels is separate.   They 
aren't using the usual toolchain (it's LLVM), so they don't *have* to 
follow any ABI for kernel object code.
> So if you wanted to do genetic programming and produce actual code, 
> would you have to uniquify functions names?  There is the code bloat 
> issue too if created lots of functions, but if they have an unload 
> feature then that would work.
Offhand, I can't think of a reason it wouldn't work.   Other than it's C 
and butt ugly to manipulate with automation.
There is a clReleaseKernel routine.  Presumably then a new one could be 
compiled with the same name.   (Haven't tried it though.)

Marcus