Hacker News Reader

What about Apple Silicon / Metal support?

Thanks for bringing this up. I posted an answer to the same question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39009566

But seeing that we already have two questions about it makes me think whether this should be something we should think more about when we are prioritizing work.

This so going to sound extreme, but it is true: I personally and professionally won’t use it for anything until it has Metal support.

The simple fact is that me and my team do our development largely on MacBook Pros and Mac Studios. We have some GPU rigs for running production code on Lunux or Windows with NVIDIA GPUs, but all of our developer tooling is on macOS. Anything that can’t run natively in recent Apple hardware gets second-class support.

That doesn't seem extreme to me, as I generally feel similarly. If you (or other readers) are genuinely interested in using Chapel with Metal, please open an issue on our GitHub repository capturing your request, as that would be valuable to us.

Just to make sure it didn’t get lost, note that it is possible to develop GPU code in Chapel on a MacBook using the cpu-as-device mode Engin mentions above, and then deploy it on NVIDIA GPUs on production systems by recompiling. This is how I develop/debug GPU computations in Chapel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com