Painting “High Rise” made by Huma Mulji

If you read The Disasters of Visual Designer Tools you’ll find a common thought about easy programming: many programmers don’t learn the hard-to-grasp backgrounds any more, but twiddle around and click a program together. In the early days of BASIC, you could add Assembly-code to speed up calculations; you only needed tot understand registers, cache and other details of the CPU. The people who did that and learnt about hardware, can actually be considered better programmers than the C++ programmer who completely relies on the compiler’s intelligence. So never be happy if the control is taken out of your hands, because it only speeds up the easy parts. An important side-note is that recompiling easy readable code with a future compiler might give faster code than your optimised well-engineered code; it’s a careful trade-off.

Okay, let’s be honest: OpenCL is not easy fun. It is more a kind of readable Assembly than click-and-play programming. But, oh boy, you learn a lot from it! You learn architectures, capabilities of GPUs, special purpose processors and much more. As blogged before, OpenCL probably is going to be the hidden power for non-CPUs wrapped in something like OpenMP.

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