Hacker News

> I strongly dislike CUDA. Once you have allowed that proprietary cr*p

Genuine question...why not just type "crap"? It's not even that much of a curse, but I've never really understood the point of self-censorship. If you don't want to curse then you could just use a non-curse word.

> Once you have allowed that proprietary cr*p into your C++ codebase

People have been doing that all the time for every kind of codebase. It's just part of the business. I don't see how it's worth having any emotions or opinions about it. Seems like you are wasting your energy.

Are win32 APIs proprietary? So you decide to use them, use a wrapper/UI framework, or don't develop for Windows. Easy choice.

Developing for embedded devices? So you read the manufacturers manual and implement based on the spec, use some sort of HAL if they are available, or you don't have a job. Even simpler.

Launching kernels manually is an error prone PITA which I believe is the principle reason for CUDA's popularity. Having the compiler give an error when you mess up is a huge benefit. But having the compiler allow you to express "I want to launch this kernel over a grid with these dimensions, with these arguments" as a single expression is where the vast majority of the value comes from.

The having it all in a single file is mostly an artefact of the fact that it is C++, because C++ is single file at a time compilation. In D (which is multiple files in a single compiler invocation) with DCompute (which targets CUDA and OpenCL with upcoming support for Vulkan and Metal), you are required to write the kernels in a separate module, but you get all the benefits of the compiler complaining when you mess up _and_ the expressivity of "launch me this kernel".

Having also played with Metal and WebGPU (at least years ago), I would say that CUDA is, amazingly, the best GPGPU API we have. Do I wish we had an open source parallel programming language as good or better than it? Yes. But asymmetrically hating on CUDA like this is how we continue to lag behind it in UX.

> The best way to program GPUs is face up to the reality that they are not the same machine as the CPU, write your kernels in separate files, and launch them manually

Not to mention that this is a completely sane way to use CUDA as well.

from what i can tell, you're going to be stuck with that no matter what you do

i'm currently using vulkan, and HLSL via dxc. which should be portable but it's not.

apple refuses to support vulkan, and relies on moltenvk and there's a bunch of OS/hardware/driver differences no matter what you do, that you'll probably have to feature test for, and compile a few different versions of your code no matter what you do

i think if you're doing something that you don't have to distribute to customers, just picking one stack and getting locked in has some appeal.

it leaves you vulnerable to lockin. but, especially in the age of ai, "claude, port this to vulkan" seems like a good enough defense against that

> The best way to program GPUs is face up to the reality that they are not the same machine as the CPU, write your kernels in separate files, and launch them manually

Isn't that how CUDA code is normally written?

You could also use Mojo, one language for all targets.

I don't mind CUDA, I do mind that all of the SDKs don't dynamically load the various CUDA shared libraries at runtime.. intertwining itself into your application linking process makes for extreme binary portability inconvenience.

Anyone here looking at Modular's offerings?

? I find it hard to see the issue here. Just put it in a separate file and call it?

Is this satire? D3D12 and Metal aren't any less proprietary than CUDA.

yeah, just write a stub/wrapper around it and abstract. it's the classic coupling problem. nothing to do with CUDA

[flagged]

[dead]

Nobody cares if kernels are written in Rust. Kernels were meant to be written in C, but if you want to go more high-level try Triton or a similar DSL that nicely abstract tile sizes etc.

I’ve had this happen to me several time over the past weeks and it’s gone from quaint to humorous to farcical to outright “is-the-world-gaslighting-me” insane.

Just today I was reading Stanley Druckenmiller’s op ed in WSJ. This dude is like 80 and has made billions of dollars, and he got Claude to write his op ed???

Unbelievable. And the tells are so obvious, yet people still love the Claude-like quips and odd grammatical choices that read like halfway asshole halfway mid-sentence confusion.

Yeah definitely Claude. Lazy authors, if you're going to get AI to write for you please use Astra instead - it makes way less annoying prose than Claude.

I was told in the 2025 LLVM dev meeting that it will always stay in nightly because it's not practical for them to provide long-term stability guarantees that is expected of stable Rust.

Not in 2026.

VectorWare founder here. We are working with them and stoked they are investing more in Rust. I just gave a talk at RustConf about our different takes (https://rustconf2026.sched.com/event/2KNQj/making-gpus-feel-...). The video isn't up yet but you should check it out when it is. The efforts are complementary.

Towards the end of the post, we (NVIDIA) mention that this work was done in collaboration with Vectorware and others in the Rust community. And we can't wait to build further with the community.

No. Rust is a non-web programming language.

The way I understood it, rust would become an option next to Vulkan, WGPU (and opengl etc?).

But only for compute tasks. So, practically an alternative language to write compute shaders in.

WGPU/Vulkan don't work with PTX shaders by default, additional translation would be needed.

On a side note, Vulkan has extension to launch CUDA kernels: https://docs.vulkan.org/refpages/latest/refpages/source/VK_N...

cudarc been great for me, because it's easy to look up existing examples and references, and it maps 1-to-1 with what I see. I'm already having a tough time with CUDA itself, a dialect of it makes a tad harder to rely on previous work.

Seems more ergonomic in general though, both approaches they share, compared to cudarc, and less build infrastructure and fiddling with environments, which is great.

That's actually a magnificent observation. This is not only an indication of a keen eye, but a trained brilliant mind as well.

> even Nvidia

Why "even Nvidia"?

They are fully behind using AI for basically everything.

What's next? "Damn, even McDonald's is putting out unhealthy food"

I get the impression that Nvidia employees don't care too much - I started seeing fully AI-written "documentation" on some of their smaller projects more than a year ago (i.e., before it was even slightly a good idea).

What are we for, I ask? What the hell are we now. Chatters to LLMs now? Is this our future? It really is starting to feel like it now.

I hadn't read the article and read this comment as though NVIDIA themselves were implying that this library was checked but not trusted by them since it was fully LLM generated.

Another of those AI is bad for articles, great for coding.

Plenty of us share the same opinion on doing reviews of AI generated code.

Yeah. I think if the text is written for other machines, then by all means have an LLM generate it, but if it is intended for a human audience, have a human being write it.

We are still much better at writing in a way that doesn't waste other people's time.

not to worry, they have an 'AI generated summary' box too

It is the number 1 thing I cannot stand with Claude slop. It's a sort of anthropomorphization of language. Every "thing" does, produces, feels, wants, asks, answers, etc....

- "Launch is checked"

- "Question is asked"

- "The implementation answers"

- "The model wants"

- "The results name"

- "The connection surfaces"

- "The prompt wires"

- "The feature rides the mechanism"

Every single fucking thing is alive, wants things, and does things.

It's terrible. Infuriating. I want to rip my eyeballs out reading this filth. All. The. Time. "The anger is real".

Thanks, saved me a few minutes

Even their writing skills are getting rusty.

it seems like that's the way the industry is headed

Is that your honest load bearing assessment you’re going to flag?

Claude, rewrite my graphics card in Rust. Make no mistakes.

I've found sorta the opposite - in any area, it can just do everything for you, or it can be an incredible teacher. I've been re-learning a lot of higher-level math and it has been an knowledgeable, infinitely patient, always-available tutor. Of course, I could just have it do just about any math I want for me, but that's not the point.

Kinda the same with language/technology stuff - it can be a great tutor and it can scaffold other parts of a project for you. It can give you feedback and let you focus on the interesting parts.

I guess the motivation itself may be hard because of the fear of it taking over much of our jobs, but having this kind of help/feedback is pretty cool for the sake of learning things just because they are interesting!

LLM don't need to be trained in a library to use it well. It's just Rust which they know well.

I was learning Rust slowly when the LLM enabled coding became good enough. I switched from learning to full on building with Rust. I still learn high level concepts as needed but I will not be able to write Rust on my own at all.

And that sounds scary but the way I got over the fear is by realizing there are many things that I do very well but I do not know their internals very well. Driving is an example. I barely understand what the steering wheel, clutch or brake pedals do. I have driven over 130,000 Kms and I will perhaps drive more than double that in the next many years.

I have been building software since PHP/Drupal days. Got into AWS S3 as a beta user. Adopted Memcached (and MQ) in 2008 out of necessity. Then Python/Django for 10 years. Then Rust. And tons of JS/TS. I owe a lot to my curiosity. I believe we can keep learning what we need and still delegate most of programming to agents.

And what prevent you exactly ?

There were humans far superior than you for writting Rust before LLM, now there's a LLM. The only difference is price and time execution.

You get an awesome teacher (LLM) ready to answer all your questions about Rust.

And you still find excuses not to learn it ?

At some point, just realize you've been lazy to learn it and LLMs are just an excuse.

Sad to break it to you, but...

I had LLMs write a pile of cuda-rust code and they were quite competent at it. Ported a bunch of (C++) CUDA kernels over, and ground away on them til they got equivalent performance

https://github.com/rdaum/eider/tree/main/backends/cuda-oxide

And mostly just DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, too. Not even a frontier model.

Sorry.

[dead]

The same way as people trust AI sloppy on their code.

Once again... There's literally no point to a low level shader language for heterogenous back ends.

Rust just makes you sign a waiver first.

There's a lot of unsafe code at that level... Rust probably makes it more painful for little gain

Don't think we're gonna see garbage collections anywhere near gpu for many reasons.

Go's type system is not at the same level as C++, Fortran, Python, Julia, Haskell, Java, to quote the languages with CUDA support from NVIDIA and their partners.

[dead]