CubeCL: GPU Kernels in Rust for CUDA, ROCm, and WGPU
14 comments
·April 23, 2025LegNeato
See also this overview for how it compares to other projects in the Rust and GPU ecosystem: https://rust-gpu.github.io/ecosystem/
qskousen
Surprised this doesn't mention candle: https://github.com/huggingface/candle
the__alchemist
I don't think that fits; that's a ML framework. The others in the link are general GPU frameworks.
zekrioca
Very interesting project! I am wondering how it compare against OpenCL, which I think adopts the same fundamental idea (write once, run everywhere)? Is it about CUbeCL's internal optimization for Rust that happens at compile time?
fc417fc802
This appears to be single source which would make it similar to SYCL.
Given that it can target WGPU I'm really wondering why OpenCL isn't included as a backend. One of my biggest complaints about GPGPU stuff is that so many of the solutions are GPU only, and often only target the vendor compute APIs (CUDA, ROCm) which have much narrower ecosystem support (versus an older core vulkan profile for example).
It's desirable to be able to target CPU for compatibility, debugging, and also because it can be nice to have a single solution for parallelizing all your data heavy work. The latter reduces mental overhead and permits more code reuse.
nathanielsimard
A lot of things happen at compile time, but you can execute arbitrary code in your kernel that executes at compile time, similar to generics, but with more flexibility. It's very natural to branch on a comptime config to select an algorithm.
unit149
[dead]
adastra22
Where is the Metal love…
Almondsetat
Why would anyone love something born out of pure spite for industry standards?
pjmlp
For the same reason CUDA and ROCm are supported.
syl20bnr
It also compiles directly to MSL, it is just missing from the post title.
adastra22
No it compiles indirectly through wgpu, which means it doesn’t have access to any Metal extensions not exposed by the wgpu interface.
moffkalast
From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine.
Love it. I've been using cudarc lately; would love to try this since it looks like it can share data structures between host and device (?). I infer that this is a higher-level abstraction.