Re:The Idea of Lisp
by AnimalMuppet on Friday December 16, 2016 @01:46PM
(#13195631)
Wouldn't it be harder to get Lisp to run in a GPU, though?
Or perhaps my point is, wouldn't it be harder to get old-style (symbolic) AI to run in a GPU than ML-style AI? (If I understand correctly, the old style is a lot of walking data structures, and the new style is largely matrix operations. The latter seems like a much better fit for a GPU than the former.)
Well, the Connection Machine was highly parallel.
Also the declarative way of programming in languages like Lisp, and also the macros, would surely allow for nice expressive DSLs.
So far I am only aware of companies exploring Haskell and F# support for GPUs, but I guess it is usually a matter of someone trying it out.
After all, there is FPGA tooling generation support for Clojure already,e.g. Piplin.
I think it is also a matter of culture, probably if the likes of AMD and NVidia cared, they could invest some money into making such languages run properly on GPGPUs, instead of leaving it to researchers alone how to target PTX and ROCm.
On the other hand something like C++17 would already offer many of the Lisp benefits, even if a bit uglier.