dcompute VS makepad

Shameless plug: LDC (the LLVM based D compiler) can already target CUDA (and OpenCL) and wraps its API and all of the nasty details involved in replicating <<<>>> kernel launches with https://github.com/libmir/dcompute/ with a sane syntax that's type safe. LLVM handles the codegen, and all of the "magic" is done in the library.

As noted elsewhere it seems your experience is somewhat outdated: the releases of the LLVM D Compiler (one of the two compilers worth using for production builds, the other being GDC) are buffered to the bugs introduced in DMD (which is more stable than it used to be although there are still regressions), and there is a fork based GC available for linux, but as the GC will only ever trigger on allocation, don't use it and it won't collect.

> While C++ is not by any means a great meta-language, it's improved considerably since that time.

C++ has also painted itself into a corner multiple times too, which despite being technically an improvement over the status quo are lacking severely in their utility. C++ screwed up "constexpr if" big time by always introducing a scope (which costs you a pair of {}'s in the rare occasion you need one) which means you can't conditionally insert declarations (i.e. variables, structs/classes, functions).

> but beyond the novelty you'd hardly find a mature or reliable codebase written by a team of professionals using hacks like [string manipulation and mixins].

They are a wonderful hack when you need them and nothing else will do what you want. This is not unlike resorting to macros in C++, except that its hygienic, unlike macros.

I'm not claiming the project is mature and I'm only one person, but reliable definitely out there. The most heinous set of string mixins i've ever written[1] has definitely got to be the code for generating wrappers to call the OpenCL object property querying functions (clGetDeviceInfo & friends). You need to pass a size and a void pointer to the address of the return object that you have to call once, twice or more (depending on the type of the queried property) to figure out how much memory you need to allocate to call it again.

The important thing is that the interface[2] you use to drive this code generation is very clean and return on investment for getting the generic case correct is large.

[1]: https://github.com/libmir/dcompute/blob/master/source/dcompu...

It is what Makepad is working on in an interesting way using Wasm and Rust. They have created a Figma-like DSL and a good code separation with the logic behind it. You can edit UI's of in-production apps, and they are bundling an editor for that. Accessibility is an issue, and the project are looking to offer proper support there. In their video linked on the README they run the conference slides on Makepad with live apps embedded and running at 120 fps.

https://github.com/makepad/makepad

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36567681

> if anyone tells you they need to use WebAssembly to make the UI snappy I'd advise you interrogate that assertion thoroughly.

Get prepared to be blown away by Makepad [0]. I have no affiliation with them, but just watched their most recent conference presentation [1]. The slides were made with Makepad itself and included, embedded, a full-blown IDE, a synthesizer app, a Mandelbrod to zoom in endlessly, and more. All running at 120fps. The presentation is for the most part live-coding with this setup.

What they want to do is bring coders and designers closer together, and while some code is in Rust they developed a DSL for the GUI parts that is close to how Figma works. These GUI's can run anywhere.

And I couldn't help thinking "Why would people have complicated stacks to create Web 2.0 apps for the Google Web, when they have this?", in other words an opportunity to break out of the browser straitjacket.

[0] https://github.com/makepad/makepad

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC4FCS-oMpg

For those who haven’t seen it, Makepad is also an in-browser code editor with an open-source UI toolkit. Looks like this synth is one of the examples of the UI toolkit.

https://makepad.dev/

And I'm obsessed with what happens when you press Alt in their editor. I never knew I wanted this, but boy, do I want it.

I tried this, using https://makepad.dev our GPU accelerated UI and renderstack. And unfortunately it wasn't a great experience. Text popping forward for whatever reason is not really an improvement (i tried indent depth, syntax highlighting reasons, cursor behavior). Maybe 'veeeeery' subtly could do something, but otherwise you dont want it to break visual symmetry as we are used to

Wow, so they did: https://github.com/makepad/makepad/pull/142

It says on the front page Mac and Web only

https://github.com/makepad/makepad#prerequisites

(windows and linux are coming )

We can! It’s a lot of work because you don’t have the whole JS ecosystem to fall back on, but to some that’s a feature not a bug.

My favorite example of this is https://makepad.dev

And a feature highlight of Code Lens. The idea is borrowed from https://github.com/makepad/makepad

When it comes to compile times, the most optimized Rust codebase I know for optimized for this is makepad.dev [1].

It is compiling from scratch on mac m1 in around 7.5s [2] and that's +100k lines of Rust. However there is close to none dependencies, so this +100k is all there is to compile pretty much.

[1] https://makepad.dev/

[2] https://twitter.com/rikarends/status/1467529091284934666