alt Hacker NewsYes but there are business costs to using high-level proprietary tools and libraries. If you write your app using win32, you won’t be able to port is very easily. You’re also stuck with whatever bad or bizarre decisions Microsoft made.
It’s even worse for CUDA. GPUs are expensive, and now you’re vendor locked. You’re between a rock and a hard place. Either spend millions in engineering time, or millions on price-gauged hardware.
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I wonder which APIs you would use to port easily, because POSIX and Khronos aren't it either, as they are industry standards driven by companies where one has to pay for a seat at Open Group and Khronos offices.
> If you write your app using win32, you won’t be able to port is very easily.
Is this still true? eg, Shopify saying porting is now easy so no need for abstractions.
” If you write your app using win32, you won’t be able to port is very easily.”
This is wrong way around.
If you don’t support the platform your app runs on using the native api:s to the hilt your port is just bad.
If you actually want to support multiple platforms _you actually need to support_ them from the ground up.
This is speaking industrially and businesswise. A professional software business always has per-platform implementation resources. Or they have just one platform. Or they pretend they are multiplatform and then _everybody_ _daily_ fights with the problems this causes.
Obviously those elements that can be portable should be. It’s like Einsteins simplicity maxim - your codebase should be as portable as can be but not more.
” It’s even worse for CUDA…”
No these are just the business and market constraints. If this does not make sense for your offering then don’t use it. This feels like false FOMO - CUDA is not a silver bullet but it might be a specific solution to a specific problem.