metal-cpp VS pldb

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().

Not exactly what you are looking for, but you would probably be interested in https://pldb.io

> How do you define single creator?

The creators define how many creators there were.

It's all open source and anyone can fix any mistakes by updating one line (for example, here's the creators entry for Python: https://github.com/breck7/pldb/blob/b8ae74253733e4aa0fb57d26...).

We generally don't have any disputes but there's the occasional error and always open to pull requests to fix those.

But you do bring up a good point about contributors/maintainers. Adding that data is definitely on the priority list, but might be a 2025/2026 thing.

> if you follow one or more internal links, the back button loops

This should not happen.

Any chance you could record a Loom (or other screencast tool), showing me what you mean?

That way I can add a fix to our open source, public domain database of languages (https://github.com/breck7/pldb), which I thought could really help the OP, who is building a new language.

> Almost unusuable!

Almost?! Wow! I'll take that as a compliment. I just assumed it was completely unusable on an untested platform like that ;).

Again, very sorry for the experience, and if you'd like to get involved helping make it work great on Android for Firefox, source code is:

https://github.com/breck7/pldb

Or we'd gladly accept any grants to prioritize that kind of work!

www https://pldb.io

This may have been posted before, but recently put a lot of effort into making this page better.

New features:

- Lots more links to the homepages of creators. Check out some of these! Some of the most interesting, most pristine pages on the web.

- New sparkline showing a histogram of when creators were born.

- Download as JSON/TSV/CSV links.

- All this data is now stored in a single file using ScrollSets (Check out the source: https://github.com/breck7/pldb/blob/main/creators/creators.s...) ... More on ScrollSets: https://breckyunits.com/scrollsets.html

Still a lot more data to add. Pull requests appreciated!

You might enjoy https://pldb.io/, which is a paywall free, open source, public domain, database you can browse completely locally, with information on all of these kinds of prior languages.

:)

We classify JSON as a data notation (line 4 on https://github.com/breck7/pldb/blob/main/concepts/json.scrol...)

We classify something like C as a "pl" (programming language) (line 4 on https://github.com/breck7/pldb/blob/main/concepts/c.scroll).

We classify both data notations and programming languages as computer languages.