metal-cpp VS crates.io

My understanding is the proliferation of “XYZ-cpp” AI frameworks is due to the c++ support in Apple’s gpu library ‘Metal’, and the popularity of apple silicon for inference (and there are a few technical reasons for this): https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/

This is basically also what the "official" C++ API for Metal does (https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/), it's an automatically generated bindings wrapper which calls into ObjC runtime functions.

I also dabbled a bit with this idea by parsing clang AST-dumps of macOS system headers:

https://github.com/floooh/objc-ast-experiments

Unfortunately this is very brittle, and also broke on ARM CPUs, I guess the shim code needs some ABI adjustments (famously, objc_msgSend has multiple "ABI shapes": https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/objc_msgsends-new-prototype.h...).

There's official C++-interface: https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/

It doesn't matter if the project driven by Microsoft or not, the cat (of automatically generated language bindings) is out of the bag. E.g. Zig is using the same approach without being an official MS project: https://github.com/marlersoft/zigwin32, and Apple has an automatically generated C++ API for Metal (https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/).

In the future, the question won't be "what language do I need to learn to code on this platform", but instead "are there language bindings for my favourite language".

this? https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/

Doesn't it just use objc/runtime.h and if anything is missing you can just add your custom api calls?

Metal has C++ bindings (which cover a full app lifecycle so you don’t have to touch Objective-C/Swift at all) but they’re based on the Objective-C memory model. There are some helper structs mimicking shared pointers, but you’ll still need to understand the basics of how an autorelease pool is used to avoid memory leaks and/or bad access crashes.

On https://developer.apple.com/metal/cpp/ check Foundation folder and all those nice Object::sendMessage().

Rust has a rich ecosystem of frameworks and libraries that let you read, parse, and manipulate text files, interact with cloud services and databases, and perform any other job that your project's development workflow may require. And because of its strong typing and tight memory management, you are much less likely to write programs that behave unexpectedly in production.

All the code discussed in this article can be accessed through this repository. For integration with existing projects consider using keyword_extraction crate available on crates.io.

So, be sure to double-check your critical libraries and be sure their alternatives exist in the Rust ecosystem. There’s a good chance the crates you need are available in Rust's crates.io repository.

The previous section was very simple, this section is also very simple but introduces us to cargo which is Rust's package manager, as a JS dev my mind goes straight to NPM.

Now, there has to be a place where all these packages come from. Similar to npmjs registry, where all node packages are registered, stored and retrieved, Rust also has something called crates.io where many helpful packages and dependencies are registered.

Before proceeding, let's check https://crates.io/, the official Rust package registry.

The most thrilling aspect has been the joy of writing the backend. It's like every struct, enum, and method in Rust forms this interconnected Multiverse of code , which you can see in crates.io which is best Documentation experience I Ever Had.

5. Crates.io

When using crates from eg. crates.io, and also things like std and core

Vendoring your packages was very tedious to even remotely get to work with Cargo. I spent a very long time getting Cargo to work together with cargo-local-registry. We vendor crates from crates.io and a custom internal registry.