Re: [Public WebCL] WebCL syntax style?

[Ian Johnson <enjalot@gmail.com>]

While in principal it is nice to have similar APIs, OpenGL and OpenCL are fundamentally different. The OpenCL runtime API lends itself very well to an object-oriented approach, it is nice to have context and queue objects to interact with and share among routines. Furthermore you can have multiple platforms, contexts and queues which can process different things and send results to different targets, whereas in OpenGL each GPU handles its own display or framebuffers.

While people have been using OpenGL to do computing (with shaders) I think its fair to encourage using OpenCL for compute and not promote the abuse of a rendering API for general purpose computing.

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 12:54 PM, <steve@sjbaker.org> wrote:

>
>
> On May 24, 2011, at 5:50 AM, tomi.aarnio@nokia.com wrote:
>
>>
>> Hi Evgeny,
>>
>> I think the WebGL group decided to put everything under
>> WebGLRenderingContext because it makes porting existing OpenGL code
>> easier. There's a huge amount of existing OpenGL code, but not that much
>> existing OpenCL code, so we decided to make the WebCL API a bit more
>> object-oriented and _javascript_-like.
>>
>> But again, this is just the Nokia prototype, and shouldn't be taken as
>> an indication of what the final WebCL API will be like.
>
> But there will be quite a few developers familiar with the WebGL API by
> the time WebCL hits the street. Having a sister API that had a
> fundamentally different style would be confusing and would increase the
> learning curve. I strongly recommend following WebGL style as closely as
> possible.

I strongly agree - we're doubtless going to have more Web*L stuff in the
future, and it is essential to keep to a single style of interface.

 -- Steve

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--
Ian Johnson

http://enja.org