README.md

Welcome to the DCompute documentation!

DCompute is a library that together with LDC is able to make D compile on GPU.

Dcompute is split into three sections, a driver, a standard library and a set of prewritten kernels.

The driver is intended to abstract the (rather unwieldy) compute API of CUDA and OpenCL. But you can still pull all the leavers yourself if you feel the need.

The standard library contains the set of primitive operations exposed by the compute environment as well as other common operations.

These docs are designed to help getting started installing & using DCompute.

Table of Contents

0. Prerequisites to using DCompute
1. Installing DCompute
2. Understanding the hardware that DCompute runs on
3. Writing kernels
4. The device standard library 4.1 index
5. The compute API driver

D

This guide assumes that the reader is familiar with the basics of D, although anyone familiar with the C family of languages should be able to understand most of it.

Some of the main differences are listed below:

The template instansiation operator is binary ! in contrast to paired angle brackets as in C++/C# et el. If Foo is a templated struct that takes one type parameter then Foo!int foo; declares a variable

There is a third class of template parameters: aliases (the other two being types and values). alias template parameters can, in addition to holding types and values, can hold symbols. These include variables, functions and lambdas. alias when used outside of a template parameter list is the equivalent to using, in C++.

~ is the concatenation operator, used unsurprisingly to concatenate arrays. Used widely in string manipulation.

Uniform Function Call Syntax (UFCS) allows you to call a free function as if it were a method of the type of its first argument (e.g. f(x,y) can be called as x.f(y)). This together with optional parentheses,x.f() where f is a method or UFCS function of x may be written as x.f, allows you to write chains of call h(g(f(x))) as x.f.g.h.

classes as are polymorphic reference types. structs are value types. Idomatic D code tends to use structs over classes. Classes are not used at all in DCompute.

The . operator will implicity follow any pointers, although it will not dereference the last one in a chain of .s. There is no operator -> or ::, these are both handled by ..

static if is D's conditional compilation construct. Code inside a taken branch is compiled into the object file, code inside a taken branch not taken must be syntactically correct, but need not be semantically correct.

For more information see the D Wiki.