[Haskell-cafe] ANN: OpenCL 1.0.1.3 package

[Martin Dybdal]

On 3 October 2011 12:56, Luis Cabellos <cabellos at ifca.unican.es> wrote:
> Hello, all.
> I want to show you the OpenCL package. I have done this using Jeff Heard
> OpenCLRaw package, but I create a new one due the lack of updates of the
> former.
> # Where to get it
> * Hackage page (http://hackage.haskell.org/package/OpenCL)
> * Repository (https://github.com/zhensydow/opencl)
> * Bugs (https://github.com/zhensydow/opencl/issues)
> * Examples (https://github.com/zhensydow/opencl/tree/master/examples).
> # Things:
> * I write it's high-level binding to OpenCL libraries, but only because I
> added more types to hide most of the alloc/free of the API, and hide the
> enums using c2hs enums.
> * The worst problem of the OpenCLRaw is the bad types it use, I learn to fix
> 32/64 bits issues with c2hs, and test it on linux machines.
> * Tested on Linux + NVidia only.
> * Jason Dagit is helping with Windows, OSX testing in own fork, also the
> call-conv fork in github has changes to work on Windows
> Please, Consider it's on experimental status but it works, I need lots of
> feedbacks for detect posible errors,
> Thanks,

Hi everyone

I just found this thread today, as I don't read Haskell-cafe that
often (too bad, I know). I have been working on a set of OpenCL
bindings for the last months myself, which I'm using to implement an
OpenCL backend to the Data.Array.Accelerate library. The work is done
at the HIPERFIT research center, Uni. Copenhagen.

My bindings are even further from the naming conventions of the OpenCL
library, but I really can't see the problem with that. People which
are used to programming OpenCL from C/C++ might have to learn how the
naming conventions of the Haskell library are, but they only need to
do this once. When the mapping between the old and the new naming
conventions are learned, they will benefit from having a more clean
interface for all future times. (No Haskell hacker should have a
problem with a steep learning curve.)

It is somewhat troubling that we now have five different interfaces to
OpenCL (that I know of), and I think we should join efforts and make
one library that is as stable as possible. The five libraries are:

 * OpenCL
 * OpenCLRaw
 * HsOpenCL
 * hopencl
 * The library presented by Benedict Gaster at AMD (yet to be released)
  ( http://developer.amd.com/zones/OpenCLZone/publications/assets/MakingOpenCLSimplewithHaskell.pdf
)

My own library is available at https://github.com/HIPERFIT/hopencl and
will be released on hackage very soon (next week probably). Please
take a look at it. It is currently tested on x86_64 Linux with both
the AMD x86/x86_64 bindings and NVIDIAs CUDA bindings. They will
probably not work on Windows in their present state, and I don't have
access to a Windows machine to test it on.

-- 
Martin Dybdal