Zig and GPUs

GPU programming used to mean wrangling C++ compilers, bloated SDKs, and vendor-specific toolchains. That’s changing. You can now write GPU code in modern languages like Rust and Zig with fewer layers. This post walks through the current state of Zig’s GPU backends and how they stack up across Vulkan, OpenCL, and native ISAs. SPIR-V, PTX and AMDGCN Zig’s GPU backend support has been steadily evolving. After roughly 4 years, the self-hosted SPIR-V backend is now mature enough to experiment with and port basic shaders and compute kernels. In case you don’t know, SPIR-V is an intermediate typed IR used by Vulkan, OpenCL, and soon DirectX. Zig can also use LLVM to directly generate PTX (NVIDIA) and AMDGCN (AMD) code, producing native binaries that can be loaded at runtime. This opens the door to writing high-performance GPU code without needing to touch CUDA, HIP, or HLSL. export fn kernel ( ) callconv ( . kernel ) void { } For a complete example, checkout snektron/shallenge. Vulkan vs ... Read full article.