Campy release v0.0.16

So, I’m getting back into the swing of things here. I’ve made a release of Campy v0.0.16. This release adds in the change for CUDA, whereby Campy interfaces directly with the graphics card drivers. The NVIDIA GPU Toolkit is now no longer required, except when building Campy from scratch. The NuGet package is also smaller because it contains only one target–netstandard2.0.

In order to save time, starting from this release, I’m suspending the builds of the Linux target for now. It only adds to the development time for Campy–which is still just “alpha”. I’ll add in the Linux target once the entire runtime and compiler are completely cleaned up.

For the runtime, I’m rewriting all the nasty C/C++ code that the “experts” wrote over the years in Net Core, replacing that code with C#, or unsafe C# code. It will first require a complete rewrite of the meta system. The goal is to make the compiler and runtime portable to any CPU or GPU using a bootstrap process.

Rewriting the runtime will require a lot of work–“years” according to the “experts”. But I am not shy from a difficult task. I don’t think it will require “years”. But, I have basically a whole lot of free time and an axe to grind.

Campy now using Piggy to access CUDA

Finally, some good news. After three months of work, which included writing from scratch a new, powerful transformational system called Piggy, the SWIG-generated CUDA interface that Campy used has been removed, and a Piggy-generated CUDA interface substituted in its place. A release of Piggy was added to NuGet, which contains the Clang AST serializer, the Piggy tool, a basic set of templates, and the build rules to call the tool on the fly in a C# project. As a bonus, due to the fact that the dependency is directly on the CUDA drivers (nvcuda.dll), and not the NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit, nothing is needed beyond the drivers for the graphics card, unless you intend to build Campy itself from scratch. So, Campy is CUDA 10/9/8 (and probably earlier versions) compatible.

Sometimes small steps are the most difficult. But, with this fix, I can move onto fixing the SWIG wrapper for LLVM, and then finally back on Campy. After this, I intend to start rewriting much of the native code in the Net Core runtime in order for it to be completely platform independent. Once that is done, C# should be portable to any CPU or GPU.