Re: [boost] [Boost-users] [compute] Review period starts today December 15, 2014, ends on December 24, 2014

Subject: Re: [boost] [Boost-users] [compute] Review period starts today December 15, 2014, ends on December 24, 2014
From: Hartmut Kaiser (hartmut.kaiser_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-12-17 08:13:46

All,

> Review of the Compute library starts today on Mon 25st of December 2014
> and will last for ten days.
> 
> The Compute library provides a C++ interface to multi-core GPGPU and CPU
> computing platforms based on OpenCL.

Caveat: I have spent only very little time to look into this library, so I might be off by a large margin.

Mainly, I have two comments wrt the API of this library:

a) I would have expected for the STL-like algorithms to be 100% aligned with N4105 (http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n4105.pdf). I strongly believe we will see an Boost implementation for N4105, so Boost.Compute could nicely integrate (or even lay the foundation) by defining its own execution policies.

b) As already mentioned elsewhere, I find it to be confusing for the library to expose two different mechanisms for dealing with the asynchrony. There is the queue type representing OCL events, and the partially used future<> return type for the user to synchronize. I believe this can be unified

For a Boost library finding the proper API is crucial. Getting this straight before acceptance is important.

Regards Hartmut
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