LispSyntax.jl VS oneAPI.jl

It turns out that Julia is ~a lisp, just with a weird syntax. If you look at the metaprogramming facilities, all expressions are first turned into s-exprs while parsing. There is no problem having a LISP syntax for Julia, and in fact this has been implemented! (https://github.com/swadey/LispSyntax.jl)

https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/metaprogramming/

The REPL had a patch, https://github.com/swadey/LispSyntax.jl/issues/36, but for some reason it didn't get released 3 years ago when the patch was actually created.

https://github.com/JuliaGPU/oneAPI.jl

As for syntax, Julia syntax scales from a scripting language to a fully typed language. You can write valid and performant code without specifying any types, but you can also specialize methods for specific types. The type notation uses `::`. The types also have parameters in the curly brackets. The other aspect that makes this specific example complicated is the use of Lisp-like macros which starts with `@`. These allow for code transformation as I described earlier. The last aspect is that the author is making extensive use of Unicode. This is purely optional as you can write Julia with just ASCII. Some authors like to use `ε` instead of `in`.

https://github.com/JuliaGPU/AMDGPU.jl

https://github.com/JuliaGPU/oneAPI.jl

These are both less mature than CUDA.jl, but are in active development.

OpenCL and various other solutions basically require that one writes kernels in C/C++. This is an unfortunate limitation, and can make it hard for less experienced users (researchers especially) to write correct and performant GPU code, since neither language lends itself to writing many mathematical and scientific models in a clean, maintainable manner (in my opinion).

What oneAPI (the runtime), and also AMD's ROCm (specifically the ROCR runtime), do that is new is that they enable packages like oneAPI.jl [1] and AMDGPU.jl [2] to exist (both Julia packages), without having to go through OpenCL or C++ transpilation (which we've tried out before, and it's quite painful). This is a great thing, because now users of an entirely different language can still utilize their GPUs effectively and with near-optimal performance (optimal w.r.t what the device can reasonably attain).

[1] https://github.com/JuliaGPU/oneAPI.jl