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

Subject: Re: [boost] [compute] Review period starts today December 15, 2014, ends on December 24, 2014
From: Sebastian Schaetz (seb.schaetz_at_[hidden])
Date: 2014-12-22 11:15:50

Thomas M <firespot71 <at> gmail.com> writes:

> We could discuss issues of the Khronos C++ bindings and your wrapper to 
> no end, but my main point remains: The Khronos version is official and 
> established; an alternative version intended for wider use must be 
> clearly superior and give people strong reasons to migrate (I am not 
> only referring to programming itself, but also people writing books on 
> OpenCL, blogs etc.). 

[snipping exemplary comparison of OpenCL C, OpenCL C++ and Boost.Compute]

I'd like to offer some more general thoughts on this:

Isn't there a precedent here? If we look at MPI and Boost.MPI we have
something similar. There is a standard C implementation and a crude (but
official and established) C++ wrapper around that (that was removed in MPI3
btw). And as far as I know Boost.MPI builds on top the C implementation of
MPI and just does a much better job than the official C++ wrapper. 

I think Boost.Compute is the better wrapper for OpenCL C. The weight of
"official" and "established" should not play such a significant role if
we're trying to think ahead.

Sebastian