It used to be UNIX as well, but Apple choose to give up on UNIX workstation market.

Even more so, having retired themselves from server and workstation market.

While using a compiler framework written in C++, yeah.

We can't cheer about using Claude for coding, and then complain they use to write blog posts as well.

This attitude is what gets me a migraine.

I got to love scripting languages with at very least a proper JIT compiler, since the work a Portuguese startup, where we did too much "rewrite Tcl in C" kind of work.

Indeed we ended up weighting between rewriting the whole thing in something else, with .NET being the winner, as Microsoft partners we got early access to ongoing .NET builds, for those that would like to present their "rewritten in .NET" products alongside the .NET public announcement in 2001.

Since then for me, the role of scripting languages like Python, Ruby has always been to be better than what I would use Bash for, PHP is what my ISP has, and that is about it.

I only use their Web client, given that there is hardly any use for it other than some Webminars that insist in using Zoom.

It is an ecosystem.

At the botton you have the PTX bytecode.

Followed by (from NVidia) compilers for C, C++, Fortran, Python JIT and more recently Julia JIT.

Additionally there are third party support for .NET, Java, Haskell tooling to also target CUDA.

Then you have the libraries ready to plug into the official NVidia compilers to reduce the need to explicitly write CUDA code manually.

Finally you have the graphical debugging and profiling tools that make targeting GPUs as easy as regular CPU programming, ignoring the hardware differences for a moment.

All wannabe replacements fail, because they focus only on the CUDA C++ compiler and nothing else.

Codeplay is Intel since the acquisition in 2022.

All commercial APIs have this moat, which is why other than Carmack famously advocating for OpenGL, the large majority of other devs never cared, they implement an API agnostic engine, use the best API for each platform, and move on with the rest of the game.

Even Carmack later admitted that DirectX had become much better than OpenGL, but they weren't going to change given the studio culture.

See https://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/pc/carmack-directx-bett...

Note that Vulkan is only somehow better than anything else out of Khronos, because at least for that API someone is paying LunarG for the Vulkan SDK, and NVidia has a vested interest in now pushing slang as the shading language.

The moment LunarG no longer gets sponsored it will be back to "here is a standard, all the best, the community will provide the tools".

On the SYSCL front, that is mostly driven by Intel, and their own OpenAI tooling, there are hardly any offerings for SYCL from anyone else. Thus it is really only pseudo-open.