D CTFE and GPU Code Generation

Question

Could D's Mixins be used to map linear algebra operations to either/both CPU code and OpenCL or GPU vertex shader functions such as GLSL? This would be a real killer application for D and better bridge logic targeted for both CPU and GPU execution. Compare this with glm and D's gl3n which is only compile fixed-size linear algebra to CPU-code.

VexCL is a proof of concept for this using OpenCL and C++11 (GCC 4.6 or later) by completely abstracting away backend-dependent (CPU/GPU) implementation details about memory allocations and code execution somewhat similar to C++ AMP. So things can only get better in D right? Can mixins completely replace the use of C++ expression templates used in VexCL? Here's a nice tutorial on its use.

CTFE may also play a role here in this discussion.

Answer 1

Yes, definitely. In fact it should be quite straightforward. I did a proof-of-concept of this sort of thing back in 2007 (see my presentation at the first D conference). Hardly anything worked in CTFE in those days, but it was still an order of magnitude easier than doing the equivalent thing in C++.

The desire to do this sort of thing was part of the motivation for development of template value parameters, CTFE, and SIMD operations.